


Because I Need You to Stay

by Mnemosyne_Elegy



Series: Because Verse [2]
Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Amnesia and fun curse side effects, Angst, Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort and Humor, Memento mori, Natsu wants to fix Gray
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 03:26:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 27
Words: 224,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16526435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mnemosyne_Elegy/pseuds/Mnemosyne_Elegy
Summary: Sequel to "Because You Told Me to Go". Memento Mori had never been meant to kill, and an idea begins forming in Natsu's mind on a way to get Gray back. Because even though everyone still retains the memory of the ice mage's death, Gray may not actually be dead after all.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So, here's the sequel to "Because You Told Me to Go". The prologue is a little different from how the rest of the story is written and it might seem a little weird at first, but hopefully stuff will make sense later.

* * *

**Prologue**

_(In which Natsu finds a flower.)_

* * *

Walking—stumbling, really—away from Gray's grave was one of the hardest things Natsu had ever done. Not because those terrible memories were still clawing at him in a desperate bid to keep him trapped, although they were. It was because Natsu felt like he was leaving Gray all over again, even if his friend was dead now.

(And he  _was_  dead. Natsu had the memories to prove it.)

But he couldn't stay forever because he had promised Lucy and the others that he would come back, so he eventually dragged himself out of the never-ending nightmarish cycle and stumbled out of the valley.

He felt like he needed something from this place to bring back with him, as if that would somehow let him keep a piece of Gray. What a stupid idea. But regardless, there was nothing to take. Gray was gone and there wasn't anything left of him here but a gravestone and an unceasing torrent of terrible memories.

So Natsu left.

(Again.)

He was still hazy and disoriented, his mind torn between the memories of the past and the present, and the curse-memories still fighting him for control the whole way, so his escape from this valley of death passed as a foggy blur and a mindless struggle to leave. He collapsed when he reached the top of the hill, panting in exhaustion and grief as he leaned against the wooden sign whose warning he had ignored earlier. Natsu took a few moments to collect himself before he staggered to his feet.

He had been too out of touch with reality to be very aware of the thorny vines scratching at his skin as he escaped the valley, but now he could see the numerous scratches and beads of blood that littered all the exposed areas of his body. Hissing softly in pain, he carefully detached some of the vines and spiky branches that had ripped out of the ground and stayed snagged in his clothing. As he pulled off the last of them, he noticed that one of the vines had a small white flower growing on it.

Natsu gently detached the blossom from its vine and studied it. A flower was a stupid memento to take from a gravesite, but it wasn't like he had a lot of options here. And besides, something about its almost translucent petals reminded him of ice.

(And ice reminded him of Gray.)

So he took the flower back with him, careful to keep it hidden from the others when he met up with them. Because he did, after all, go back to the others. And Fairy Tail was reformed and Natsu moved back into his house with Happy and everything should have been okay, except that Gray was still gone.

Natsu kept the flower on the windowsill in his bedroom, and over the next few days he watched as it slowly withered and died, its once-crystalline petals curling up at the edges and fading to an ugly brown. He decided that it had never really looked that much like ice after all.

(Because ice reminded him of Gray, and this dying brown monstrosity did not.)

And even though it was just a stupid flower and absolutely did  _not_ remind him of Gray, Natsu waited until night when Happy was sleeping and then crept out of the house with the silly thing held carefully in his hands. He took it out to the little garden outside his window and spent a few minutes studying its desiccated petals in the moonlight. Even the soft moonlit glow couldn't disguise its ugliness.

(Death was ugly.)

He shook himself out of his reverie, disgusted with himself. It was just a damn flower. But still…He silently knelt on the ground and set the object of his attention aside. Digging through the soft dirt with his fingers, he made a small hole and placed the flower carefully inside before he covered it up again. It seemed like a silly thing to do, but dying things made for good fertilizer. And putting the flower in the dirt would…make it fertilize the rest of the garden better than if he just dropped it on top of the dirt. Obviously. That was gardening 101. It wasn't like he was  _burying_  it or anything.

(He hadn't been there to bury Gray.)

And even though it wasn't a funeral, Natsu sat in the dirt for several long minutes, staring at the tiny mound in silence. At some point he realized that a few stray tears had begun rolling down his cheeks and he hastily wiped them away, not caring when he swiped dirt across his face. That was the last straw. He stood up abruptly and briskly walked back into the house. He was not going to cry over a dead flower.

(Not even one that reminded him of Gray.)

So in the end, he didn't bring anything back from the grave. The flower rotting away in the ground didn't count, even if he spent quite a bit of time gazing at its barely visible mound out his window. He didn't bring anything back, but it wasn't like he needed a memento to remind him of Gray's death. The curse had given him memories to take back, and that was quite enough. In a way, Natsu supposed that he had brought something back after all, even if it was only a set of haunting memories.

Those memories brought gifts of their own. They brought him depressing thoughts to get lost in and terrible nightmares full of blood and death. In fact, they took over his life for quite some time. Natsu might go through the motions of daily living in an attempt to throw his friends off the scent, but he was a sleepwalker. Flashes of memories that weren't his held his attention throughout the day and kept him captive at night. They were terrible enough to keep him shackled for the rest of his life, and they very well might have if something didn't snap him out of it.

He supposed that he should thank the damn flower, because it was the flower that gave him the idea and reminded him of what was important.

(Gray had always done that.)

It was after he finally let go of the memories for a moment that he came to the sudden conclusion that Gray was not dead after all.


	2. Ch 1-Natsu has an epiphany

**Chapter 1**

_(In which Natsu has an epiphany.)_

* * *

The day of Natsu's great epiphany dawned much the same as any other. He woke with a gasp and a flailing of limbs, clawing his way out of yet another nightmare where he was watching Gray die in horribly bloody ways. He made his excuses to Happy when the little cat was flung from the bed, and they were adequate enough that the Exceed didn't ask him any prying questions during breakfast or the walk to the guild. The guild hall had, of course, been destroyed during the attack by Tartaros, but in the months since Fairy Tail had reformed, the mages had built up a temporary hall. It was smaller and less fireproof than the old one, but that was okay since Natsu wasn't fighting anyone or trying to burn things down now that Gray was gone.

Besides, he was too distracted with turning over pieces of foreign memory in his mind and replaying them over and over again. He had participated in the rebuilding of the hall and continued to hold up his end of the conversations—albeit with mostly noncommittal hums and absent nods—but his mind was in another place altogether, obsessing over the fact that he had left Gray to die.

He should really be over this by now—it had been months. He blamed the curse-memories.

But this day passed without any distinguishing events until Natsu decided to head home early. It was only late afternoon, but he pled fatigue and a desire to get out of their cramped quarters. Leaving Happy behind to flirt outrageously with Charle, Natsu stumbled back to his house like a sleepwalker, his eyes unfocused as he continued to puzzle over snippets of Gray's last memories.

It wasn't until he was walking up the path to his door that his eyes fell on the garden and he stopped in his tracks. He wasn't sure what exactly he found so intriguing about the garden, but something was tugging at the edges of his memory, trying to tell him something. It was something that he had felt weakly a few times over the past weeks, but he had been too preoccupied to give it much thought, and it hadn't seemed particularly important. But now it had escalated, to the point where he was feeling like he had missed something crucial.

Natsu slowly walked over to where he had…where he had…Oh, alright—where he had  _buried_ the flower from the valley. He crouched down in the dirt and peered at the almost non-existent mound marking its…grave. Damn, he felt silly thinking about a flower like this. But in order to understand what this feeling was trying to tell him, he would have to push aside his tendency to deny things he didn't want to feel so that he could consider things clearly. Right now he needed facts.

So it was true. The flower had reminded him of Gray, and that's why he had taken it back home with him. He had watched it die and it had disgusted him, because he didn't want to think about Gray dying like that. And then he had given it a goddamn  _funeral_  and buried it in his garden because he still couldn't quite separate it from Gray, and it would feel wrong to crumple his friend up and toss him on top of some dirt.

Seeing those facts for what they were irritated Natsu, because they made him feel stupid. He had been mourning a flower. A  _flower_. But still, there was something about the whole situation that reminded him of Gray. Not just the flower itself, but something about the situation as a whole.

Natsu sat back on his heels and considered it. He had equated the flower to Gray, in some small part of his mind. The stupid part of his mind. He shook off that thought, having no patience for prejudices right now. No more denial—he needed to see things for what they really were.

So. The flower was Gray, in the least literal sense possible. Natsu had left Gray to die, so he couldn't bring himself to leave the flower behind because it reminded him too much of that failure. He had then proceeded to watch it like a hawk for the next few days as it slowly withered. As it  _died_. Because he hadn't been by Gray's side while his friend was dying. And then he had buried the thing and practically given it a funeral. He had even cried. Well, he hadn't been there when Gray was buried, and funnily enough, he had been mostly numb right up until he had visited Gray's grave. He hadn't even cried until the memories—

He froze. The memories. It all somehow led back to the curse-memories.

Natsu narrowed his eyes and stared contemplatively into the blank space before him. Memento Mori—the memory of death. They had gotten those alright. Everyone had seen the memories of Gray's death, and Gray had been relieving his almost-death by the dragonlings before he died this time. The curse had been made to destroy Zeref by reminding him of his mortality since he was an immortal and by erasing him from existence entirely since he couldn't really die.

Yes, Gray's devil slayer magic had made the curse react in a strange and unnatural way, but Memento Mori had never been meant to kill, as such. Natsu felt that this line of reasoning required a few leaps of faith, but he was less interested in the logic and more desperate for the hope it brought. But he also couldn't just go running into the guild yelling that Gray wasn't dead unless he came up with some more solid reasoning.

Besides, there were some key factors missing from his explanation. If Gray wasn't dead, then what  _had_ happened? And in any case, Fairy Tail had buried Gray's body. If he hadn't been dead before, surely he would have died by now. He would have been buried in a casket for over a year now with nothing to keep him alive.

That thought made Natsu feel sick, so he hurriedly pushed it aside. No, Gray hadn't died, and he was still alive. Sort of. The question was  _how_. Gray hadn't been erased entirely because there had still been a body, but perhaps something about his soul or his mind had been erased instead. Or…maybe not erased.

Natsu's eyes widened slightly as his mind suddenly jumped to a seemingly random thought. It was like when he had fought Zero of Oración Seis. Zero had cast a spell that had been supposed to erase Natsu's existence and create a world of nothingness. That spell wasn't quite the same as Memento Mori, but it had had a similar purpose. Both had been meant to consume and erase rather than kill.

And Natsu had survived Zero's spell. He could still remember how he had been transported to some kind of alternate world. What had Zero called it? The Land of Nil? Natsu brushed off the question. The name wasn't important. What was important was that he had used his magic to burn his way out, although he had needed Igneel, or at least some memory of Igneel, to remind him of what was important first.

He jumped to his feet excitedly, pacing back and forth rapidly as he considered this. Sure, his entire body had been transported in that spell and presumably that's also what should have happened with Memento Mori, but perhaps that was the point at which Gray's new magic had started interfering with the curse. Maybe Gray could have also been trapped in some alternate dimension of nothingness as well, in mind if not in body.

He frowned slightly. Well, if that was the case, why hadn't Gray found his way out by now? It had taken Natsu a little while to break free of Zero's spell though, and he had needed a reminder. Maybe Gray just needed to be reminded of…something…that would help him come to his senses and fight his way out. Natsu had no idea what that reminder should be or how he could get it to Gray, but maybe one of the others would have an idea.

He took off running back towards the guild, bursting with the excitement and hope of this news. Some part of him was aware that his theory had enough holes to make it look like Swiss cheese, but he brushed off that concern, figuring that he could work out the details later. He was also vaguely aware that he had missed a crucial piece of what that flower had almost reminded him of, but he could figure that out later too. Right now he needed to get to the guild as soon as possible and share this new idea.

If he had been thinking more clearly, he might have found a more subtle way to break the news to his guildmates, but Natsu had never been a very subtle person at the best of times, and his sudden excitement and surge of hope had made him too eager to be very circumspect about how he chose to broach the subject. So instead of leading up to the main idea with a careful explanation of the evidence at hand or starting off with a more modest assertion, he burst into the guild and shouted "Gray's not dead!"

Instant silence fell over the hall as every head swiveled to face Natsu, who was doubled over in the doorway, panting for breath. The lull lasted for all of five seconds before Lucy and Juvia burst into tears and everyone else averted their suddenly sad gazes. Natsu blinked at them all stupidly, realizing that he probably should have thought this out better.

Erza approached him cautiously and laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes were sad, but also wary as she studied him. "Natsu," she said carefully, "we watched him die. I'm sorry."

Her voice snapped the dragon slayer out of his temporary daze and he shook off her hand impatiently. "I know, I know," he replied hurriedly, trying to make them understand his reasoning before they all shut down and ignored him completely. "But I have a theory."

"A theory," Erza repeated flatly, her eyes suddenly expressionless.

"We know that you weren't here when Gray died, but we watched it with our own eyes," Cana said quietly as she reached across the bar to get another tankard of ale. She looked like she intended to drink herself into a stupor to forget all about this unwelcome reminder of the past. "There's no way he could still be alive. We watched him die and then we buried him. He's been in the ground for over a year. Gray was a very close friend of mine and I wish that he was still here, but we have to face the facts. Gray is gone, Natsu. I'm sorry."

Natsu wanted to yell at them for not even listening to what he had to say, but he had to admit that he understood their reluctance. If he had watched a friend die and then someone else had come back a while later and started randomly announcing that he wasn't actually dead, he would probably react badly too. As it was, there were a lot of sad eyes, a lot of uncomfortable expressions, and a few melancholy faces mixed with touches of irritation or anger. No one looked horribly supportive, but Natsu pressed on anyway. He couldn't back down now.

"Look, I know that," he began, forcing himself to slow down and find a way to explain himself more fully. "But will you at least listen to my idea?"

No one looked very thrilled at the prospect, but there were a few reluctant nods. Cana shoved her face into a barrel of booze and Juvia curled into Gajeel's side and hid her face, but everyone else stared at him.

"Say what you have to say," Erza said softly, "but keep in mind that we had to watch him die."

Natsu swallowed hard and took a deep breath to collect himself. "Okay. I'm not sure how much you know about Memento Mori or what it was supposed to accomplish, so I'll start from the beginning. Memento Mori was a curse Mard Geer created for the sole purpose of destroying Zeref. Because Zeref is an immortal whose concept of life and death is somewhat skewed, it was supposed to remind him of his mortality. In addition, since Zeref can't really die, the curse was supposed to wipe him from existence completely so that he was neither alive nor dead."

"How is that any better?" Gajeel interrupted belligerently. "Nonexistence is just as bad as death."

Levy touched him softly and shook her head, and he subsided, although he still watched Natsu through narrowed eyes. Juvia whimpered and he cursed quietly as he tried to comfort her. Natsu wasn't the only one who didn't always think before speaking.

"I never said it was better," Natsu answered, shifting uncomfortably under the weight of a roomful of disapproving stares. "But…Well, something obviously went crazy because Gray should have just disappeared then and there, but he didn't."

"Yeah. Because he died instead," Laxus muttered from across the room, his arms crossed and his eyes cold.

Natsu let out an irritated breath. He had barely gotten a few sentences in and things were already going a lot worse than he had anticipated.

"Let's just hear him out," Erza chastised wearily.

"Why? It's not like you really want to hear this nonsense either," Laxus shot back.

Erza frowned over at him. She might be the guild master until they could find Makarov again, but she was still mostly untried as master and Laxus had always had problems with authority figures. Regardless, she still had the final say in things involving the guild, so if Natsu could keep her on his side then he still had a chance.

"Because we said we would listen," she said firmly. "We don't have to agree with what he says, but he still deserves to have us at least listen. You know that he's had a really hard time ever since he came back and found Gray gone. The least you can do is give him a chance to say his piece. By all means, ignore him afterward if you want to. But seriously, just stay quiet for a couple minutes."

Laxus rolled his eyes and looked away, but didn't protest farther. Most of the other guild members looked back over at Natsu grudgingly. He swallowed with some difficulty. Erza hadn't exactly given him a vote of confidence either, and if he couldn't win her over then he didn't have much of a chance of getting the others to believe him.

"We kind of came to the conclusion that Gray's new devil slayer magic is what interfered with the curse and made it affect him in such strange ways," Natsu continued. "I mean, it's the only way he could have taken the full force of a curse strong enough to kill immortals and still stay alive for a while. But it clearly had some…less beneficial effects as well. It wasn't able to let him escape unscathed, but it  _did_ interfere with the curse in an attempt to give him a chance. But think about it—it's more likely that his magic twisted the rules of the curse a little instead of completely rewriting them.

"Memento Mori was never meant to kill. It was meant to erase."

"There was a body, Natsu," Lucy whispered, her eyes filled with tears. "He couldn't have been erased."

Natsu nodded. "I know that, but…Honestly, this whole situation reminded me of something else. You remember when we fought Oración Seis? I ended up fighting Zero, and he cast a spell on me that was supposed to do something kind of similar to what Memento Mori was supposed to do."

Lucy looked alarmed. "It was supposed to 'erase' you?"

"Yes," Natsu confirmed. "He cast it and I got sucked into some kind of alternate reality or something. It was supposed to destroy me until there was nothing left, but I fought my way back out."

"If you got 'sucked into' some kind of other dimension, then wasn't your body gone?" Laxus asked, unimpressed.

"Well, yes," Natsu admitted. "I imagine so."

"Gray's body was still here," Elfman interjected.

Natsu sighed in irritation. " _Yes_. We've already established that. But see, the theory is sound that there could be some kind of alternate world of nonexistence that Gray  _could_ have gotten stuck in."

"Even if such a world exists, I don't see how Gray could have ended up there if we watched him die and buried his body," Charle said suddenly as she and Happy appeared behind Natsu, inching around him and into the guild.

The dragon slayer wasn't sure what they had been doing or where they had been, but they seemed to have heard at least the latest part of his explanation. Happy looked up at him sadly.

"Maybe we should go home," the little cat suggested quietly.

Natsu shook his head stubbornly. "Not until they see what I'm talking about." He looked back over at Charle. "What I'm proposing is that some part of him—his mind or soul or whatever—got stuck in some kind of state of nonexistence, even though his body remained."

There was a heavy silence.

"Think about it," he tried again. "You all experienced Gray's last memories. At the end he was losing himself. He was forgetting things and reliving his death and even forgetting who he himself was. That sounds like the beginning of a transition to a state of nonexistence."

His eyes darted about the guild hall as he desperately searched for anyone who might believe him and help him figure out what to do next. It wasn't encouraging. A few, such as Laxus and Gajeel, stared at him coldly. Most of the others wouldn't even meet his gaze, instead staring uncomfortably off to the side.

Finally, Erza cleared her throat and spoke up reluctantly, clearly feeling that it was her duty to respond to him on behalf of the guild since she was its current master.

"It's an interesting theory, but it has a lot of holes and requires an awful lot of assumptions to make it work," she said slowly, picking her words with care.

"Well, yeah. That's because I just came up with it a few minutes ago. But if we put our heads together and think it through, I'm sure we can figure out—"

"Please," Lucy interrupted, her voice thick with tears. "Please stop, Natsu. You didn't watch him die the same way we did. I'm sorry, but I can't take false hope like this—it's asking to get my heart broken again. I know you feel really guilty about what happened, but you need to find a way to move on and let him go. Gray is gone, Natsu."

He opened his mouth to argue, but then she finally looked up at him and he could see that her eyes were clouded with anguish. Tears dripped down her cheeks as she silently begged him to stop. He slowly shut his mouth. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes momentarily before looking back at Lucy and the rest of his guildmates.

He had been so caught up in his discovery that even though he had understood that they wouldn't be happy to reminded of Gray's horrible death, he had managed to miss exactly how upset they still were. Even Gajeel and Laxus, he realized, were upset. That's why they had been so snappish and unwilling to listen to his theory. No one wanted false hope at this point, and they would rather believe that he had snapped and gone off the deep end than seriously entertain a possibility that might only bring them more heartache.

Natsu's anger drained away. He supposed that he couldn't really blame them. But…the idea wouldn't let him go. There were still some crucial pieces of the puzzle that he was missing, but if he found them, he thought that he could be onto something. But he clearly needed to find those pieces before bringing this idea up to the others again. They weren't ready to hear it yet. Not unless he got proof.

"Alright, I'm sorry," he said quietly.

He let Happy shepherd him home and tolerated all of the Exceed's worried questions. He figured that everyone just thought that his guilt and grief had resurfaced and were fueling strange fantasies and false hopes, and he could accept that, for now. So he tried to go back to acting normal for everyone's sake.

It was a few days later that an idea for obtaining proof struck him as he lay in bed staring at the darkened ceiling: he needed a body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So far the explanation seems kind of sketchy and there's obviously still a lot of holes. Most of those holes will be filled in within the next few chapters (and a couple pieces aren't fully explained until much later). As for Natsu... Yeah, his mind is kind of messed up right now so his reasoning is a little weird. Kind of hard to blame the guild for not believing him at the moment lol


	3. Ch 2-Natsu becomes a grave robber

**Chapter 2**

_(In which Natsu becomes a grave robber.)_

* * *

One moment Natsu was just staring blankly upwards into the darkness, and the next he was sitting bolt upright, eyes widening as another crazy idea hit him. He peered about hastily to make sure that he hadn't woken Happy, but the little blue cat was still curled up in a sleepy ball and showed no signs of awakening. Breathing a sigh of relief, Natsu shifted so that he could sit more comfortably in a cross-legged position and leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists.

There was only one kind of physical proof he could think of that might convince the others to really consider his theory, and that was Gray's body. The body was what had thrown the biggest wrench into the whole idea. After all, if Gray had been wiped from existence, his body should be gone. It clearly wasn't, since Fairy Tail had buried it. Natsu thought that he could still work this quirk into his theory, but only if he disproved a few things first.

The first issue was that bodies had an unfortunate tendency to decay over time. Even if some piece of Gray had been locked away in some state of nonexistence, and even if Natsu could somehow rescue him and bring him back, the ice mage would have nothing to come back to if his body had rotted away. Another possibility was that the body had had a delayed reaction to the whole erasure thing and no longer existed at all. Which would be terrible for the same reasons as the first possibility, and also because Natsu didn't think his friends would believe him if he came back to the guild ranting about how Gray's body had vanished as proof of his theory. Given how they were treating him like fragile glass that might shatter at any moment these days, they would probably think that he was making it up.

But the possibility that Natsu favored was something else altogether.  _If_ the piece of Gray that defined him as Gray had somehow gotten trapped in an alternate reality and  _if_ there was a way to bring it back and restore Gray to his former self, then Natsu had to conclude that his body had entered some kind of stasis. Okay, so maybe the idea was a little out there, but it did make a kind of sense. Gray had been slowly broken down before he died, until he had lost touch with reality, been unable to distinguish between life and death, lost most all of his knowledge, and ultimately forgotten himself. Natsu theorized that that process had been the curse's way of reducing Gray to a state of nonexistence. After all, how could Gray possibly exist if he had lost all of those things?

In a way, that process would have frozen Gray in a kind of stasis of nonexistence, in whatever tiny pocket of nonreality the curse had created for him. And if Gray himself was somehow frozen, then it was possible that his body had been frozen in stasis as well. That was, of course, assuming that Gray and his body still shared some kind of tenuous link, even if they had been separated. If the ties between Gray and this world had been severed entirely…Well, Natsu wasn't sure that there would be a way to bring Gray back at all in that case.

He slid out of bed quietly, careful not to disturb Happy, and padded softly across his bedroom floor. Leaning against the windowsill, he stared thoughtfully down at the little patch of garden outside. In the pale moonlight, he could just make out the slight lump marking the flower's burial site. Something about it still tugged at the corners of his awareness, but he still couldn't quite put his finger on what it was. It was something about the curse-memories, the ones that had appeared after Gray's death. They had to serve some kind of purpose.

Natsu considered that train of thought for a few minutes before sighing in defeat and turning his mind back to his newest idea about Gray's body instead. He could work out that lingering feeling later. Right now he had quite enough to think about on the topic at hand.

He had to admit that this whole idea terrified him. In order to find his proof or lack thereof, he would have to secretly dig up Gray's body. That in itself made him a little squeamish, but what really frightened him was what he might find once he did so. If he found a perfectly preserved body, it would bring him a lot of hope because it meant that there was still a possibility, however slight, that Gray could be saved. But if he found a rotted corpse…

He wasn't sure that he could handle that, and he had to admit that the chances of finding a decomposed mess were pretty high. But still, wouldn't that be better than nothing? At least it would give him an answer, even if it was negative. He wouldn't spend the rest of his life wondering or entertaining this ludicrous idea that Gray could have somehow survived.

And he had to admit that the idea was a little ludicrous. While he was theorizing and making connections it seemed to make perfect sense, but when he took a step back to look at it more objectively, he could see how many holes it had and how many leaps of faith it required to operate. Maybe he could continue to fill in some of those gaps if he kept puzzling everything out, but would that be coming up with a genuine and likely theory, or would it be generating crazy hypotheses because he wasn't willing to let go of Gray? Natsu briefly wondered if this was just some delayed stage of denial.

But regardless, he knew that the idea would never let him go until he proved it one way or the other. And the only way to prove it would be to dig up Gray's body. If it was intact and preserved in stasis, then Natsu could continue to hope. If it was decayed and rotted…Well, at least it would burst any false hopes he was entertaining.

Natsu didn't want to consider that last possibility right now, so he quietly climbed back into bed and stared at the ceiling as he plotted his grave robbing expedition.

* * *

Natsu waited a few days before setting his plan in motion. Part of the reason was undoubtedly that he was terrified and so was postponing the inevitable, but he had some practical concerns as well. For one, his guildmates had been watching him carefully ever since his previous outburst. Some of them tiptoed around him cautiously as if he were a ticking time bomb that could be set off at any moment, and he sometimes caught them giving him concerned and melancholy looks when they thought he wasn't watching. For several days there was always someone by his side, talking to him or asking him to do jobs or come with them to some event. He rather thought that they just didn't want to leave him alone to brood over grossly fantastical ideas.

They were clearly worried about his mental state, so he humored them for a bit. He feigned normalcy, laughing and talking and joking like usual. Or like usual before he had come back to find Gray gone, anyway. His new post-Gray usual had been more along the lines of quiet and distracted, but that was just because the curse-memories had been haunting him. Now that he had a new scheme to focus on, he had been able to push those memories out of his mind and he was thinking more clearly than he had in months.

Natsu had never been much of a planner or schemer, but he was scheming now. He made sure to fake just the right amount of cheerfulness and genuineness. He didn't want everyone to realize that he hadn't let go of his theory yet, but he also didn't want them to get suspicious if he seemed just a little too happy. It was a delicate balancing act, but after a week and a half, he decided that he had laid all but the most persistent concerns to rest. His guildmates had started relaxing again and he was getting fewer worried looks and cautious, probing questions. Most everyone seemed satisfied that he had moved on, so he decided that it was time to put his plan into action.

His initial inclination was to just run off to Gray's grave and try explaining his disappearance later, but he forced himself to slow down and formulate a more satisfactory plan instead. It would be troublesome if anyone suspected what he was about to do, so he needed an alibi. Luckily for him, Happy provided the perfect opportunity. The little Exceed had planned a fishing trip with Pantherlily and, by extension, Gajeel. He had invited Natsu to come as well, and the dragon slayer suspected that his friend just wanted to keep an eye on him and try to cheer him up. He also suspected that Happy was trying to get an impressive fish in an attempt to awe Charle, even though the other cat was clearly uninterested in fish. But Happy would be Happy, and Natsu was glad of his friend's singlemindedness for the moment. If Happy's main goal was to impress Charle, it shouldn't be too hard to convince him to go on the trip even if Natsu ducked out at the last minute. The trip had even been scheduled to start in the morning and last through the afternoon, so he would have plenty of time to excavate Gray if he was fast.

And so Natsu set his plan into motion on the day of the fishing trip. He was already awake by the time Happy got up at the crack of dawn, but he feigned sleep until the little cat shook him.

"Rise and shine, Natsu!" Happy sang excitedly. "It's time to go catch some fish!"

Natsu opened his eyes slowly and groaned. "I don't think I'm gonna make it today, Happy," he mumbled.

The Exceed's cheerful expression morphed into one of concern. "What's wrong?"

Natsu considered his response for a moment, knowing that he would have to play his cards carefully. If he didn't give a good enough excuse then Happy would be suspicious, but if he made it sound like he was too ill then the Exceed would insist on staying with him.

"I don't know," he said after a moment. "I'm just not feeling well. I think it might have been something I ate yesterday. I think I'm just going to sit this one out."

Happy leaned forward and peered at his face. The Exceed looked as if he was about to go into mother hen mode.

"Well, you just woke up," he reasoned. "Maybe if he you get up and move around and maybe try to eat something, you'll feel better."

Natsu grimaced and scrunched up his face. "Ugh. Even thinking about eating makes me want to throw up," he protested, silently focusing on the remembered feeling of a moving train to induce a suitably nauseous expression. "And I kept waking up in pain during the night, so I don't think this is something that'll just go away within the next couple minutes."

Happy's worried frown deepened, and Natsu momentarily felt a prickle of guilt.

"Well, I can go find Pantherlily and Gajeel and tell them that we won't be coming," the Exceed decided. "We can reschedule our fishing trip when you feel better."

And here was the tricky part.

"No, don't cancel," Natsu said. "I'll be fine on my own. I'm sure the nausea will go away on its own eventually, and it's not so bad that I can't handle it by myself. I'll probably just sleep it off. No point in both of us being stuck here."

"But I don't want to leave you here alone when you aren't feeling well," Happy argued. "Besides, fishing won't be as fun without you anyway."

Natsu smiled faintly. "You'll have Pantherlily and Gajeel to entertain you," he said soothingly. "And honestly, it's not like this is our last chance to go fishing together or anything. You can go on this trip with the others and then you and I can go out again in a couple weeks, just the two of us."

He silently promised himself that he would take Happy out fishing later to make up for this deception. Happy seemed slightly mollified by this assertion, but still looked reluctant to leave.

"But—"

"If I need anything, I can always send for help from the guild. It isn't far, and I'm sure Lucy or one of the others would help me if I asked for it."

Happy's eyes lit up with a sudden idea. "That's it! I can go get Lucy and she can stay here with you in case anything happens!"

Natsu suppressed a wince as he searched for a way out of this newest obstacle. He hadn't even considered this possibility.

"Don't worry Lucy over something this trivial," he said. "I'll probably be sleeping most of the time anyway, so there's no point in making her sit here and be bored while I rest. Besides, the guild isn't far. If I need anything, I should be able to make it there without any problems.  _If_ I need help I'll ask for it, but there's no reason to worry everyone over a stomachache."

Happy still didn't look pleased with the arrangement, but he nodded reluctantly. "I guess so." He hesitated for a moment. "Are you sure you don't want me to stay? I really don't mind."

Natsu smiled at him reassuringly. He felt a little bad about taking advantage of his companion's kindheartedness, but it had to be done.

"I'm sure," he said firmly.

"Well…Is there anything I can get you before I go?" Happy asked.

Natsu opened his mouth to say no, but hesitated. His friend would be happier if he could at least do  _something_  to help, no matter how small that favor might be.

"Could you maybe get me a glass of water?" he asked after a brief pause. He wasn't all that thirsty, but at least it would make Happy feel useful.

"Aye sir."

The little Exceed disappeared from view and returned a minute later, carrying a large glass of water. His wings shimmered into existence as he flew up to set the glass down on the bedside table. Natsu sat up and propped himself up with pillows. Picking up the glass, he took a sip to appease Happy.

"Anything else?" the Exceed questioned.

Natsu shook his head. "No, I'll be fine. Thank you, Happy. Make sure you bring back some fish for dinner—don't give them all to Charle."

He grinned a little as Happy suddenly looked flustered and embarrassed.

"Aye sir," the cat said again. "If you're feeling better by then, we can have fish for dinner."

"I'll look forward to it," Natsu said with a smile. "Have fun, Happy."

Happy nodded. "Feel better soon. And if you need anything…"

"Then I know where to go," the dragon slayer finished.

Happy nodded again and finally left with one last worried glance and a wave. Natsu wanted to jump up and get started immediately, but he made himself wait. It wouldn't be good if Happy forgot something and came back, only to see the supposedly ill dragon slayer running around or missing.

After several long minutes, Natsu decided that it was safe and he slid out of bed and dressed hurriedly. He briefly considered eating some breakfast since he was starving, but rejected the idea. He had a bad feeling that he would throw it all up again if he opened up Gray's coffin and found a rotted corpse.

Not that he was going to find a rotted corpse, of course, but it paid to be cautious.

He slipped out the door and started the trek to the valley where Gray was buried. He didn't need Rogue's directions anymore since he knew the way by heart now, and he was confident that he could find it easily. No, he wasn't worried about getting lost, but he did have one or two concerns.

The first problem was that he needed to escape the city without being seen by any of his guildmates. It was still very early, but some of the early risers might be up and about, so he had to be careful not to run into them. The second issue was that the valley was well outside the outskirts of the city and he didn't know how much time he would have to spend at the grave. He would have to hurry to make sure that he made it back before Happy returned or someone else noticed that he was missing.

In response to the first problem, Natsu walked quickly and took back alleyways and a circuitous route past the guild hall. He found himself wishing that he had thought to wear a hooded jacket or a hat to cover his distinctive pink hair, but he had been too fidgety and impatient to think about it when he had left. The threat of detection set him on edge and made him keep looking around nervously, but he made it out of the city without being seen by anyone he knew.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Natsu headed out into the countryside, half jogging in his impatience to reach his destination. In all honesty, his stomach was tied up in knots and his fear should have made him drag his feet, but he didn't have time to waste. He couldn't afford to stall right now. He figured that he had several hours, but not only was the journey there and back rather long, but he also didn't know how much time he would have to spend at the grave when those curse-memories started pulling him under again. And if he found something that he didn't want to see…Well, he'd likely need some time to recover and collect himself before he ran into his friends again.

The journey to the valley passed in somewhat of a nervous, tense blur, and then Natsu suddenly found himself standing at the top of the hill leading into the gravesite. He paused for several long moments, absently leaning against the wooden warning sign as he stared down at the tombstone and the tangled mess of thorny vines surrounding it. He could feel his determination draining away in the face of such a terrifying sight. Perhaps it would be better if he turned around and went back to the house. He could hang out all day until Happy came back and no one would be any the wiser. It's not like anyone else knew what he was supposed to be doing, so he couldn't let them down.

No, the only person he would be letting down was himself.

Natsu sighed. He really didn't want to go through with this. Just the thought itself made him feel sick, and he was terrified of what he might find. But he  _had_ to know one way or the other. He needed to know if he was right to hope or if he should give up any last lingering doubts about Gray's death. He couldn't stand living in this state of uncertainty and doubt anymore. He needed a final answer.

Steeling himself, he started down into the valley. He walked quickly, ripping the thorny attackers out of his clothing and skin impatiently, because he knew that he needed to hurry. He had already experienced firsthand how difficult it was to stay in his right mind once the curse-memories started their assault, and he really didn't want to relive Gray's final days again.

He hadn't gotten far when the foreign memories began battering him once again, clawing at his mind and threatening to drag him into their clutches. Natsu gritted his teeth and focused on fighting them back as he struggled through the vines and bushes that snagged at his clothing and tried to hold him fast. He couldn't give in to them, couldn't give in, couldn't…

The curse's pull got stronger and stronger the closer he got to the grave, and by the time he had reached it, he could barely hold them back any longer. Snippets and snatches of memory kept slipping through his guard before he could block them out again.

_Something was wrong. Something was very wrong._

Natsu fought his way back out of the memory and fell to his knees next to the tombstone. He realized hazily, in the part of his mind that was still functioning properly and not wholly devoted to the struggle against the curse, that he hadn't thought to bring any kind of shovel or other tool with him.

_He knew that the curse had done something terrible to him—it was doing something to his mind and body, ripping and tearing at them in a furious frenzy. God, it hurt._

Natsu bit back a curse and began frantically digging through the earth with his bare hands. Almost a year and a half since the soil had last been disturbed had made the ground hard again, but it was still softer than if it hadn't been dug up at all. He could do this.

_He summoned up some of his father's magic and formed it into a bow. The demon magic clawed at his insides and he almost lost his focus, but he managed to hurriedly shoot the bow before it disintegrated in his hands._

Focus, focus. The repetitive motion was making Natsu lose track of time and of himself, but he kept fighting. He couldn't lose himself to the memories now or he might never find out what he needed to know. It felt like he was going nowhere, but there was a slowly growing mound of freshly turned dirt beside him. He kept shoveling more and more earth out with his hands, vaguely pleased to see that he was making a shallow hole in the ground. He hoped that Fairy Tail hadn't buried Gray too deeply.

_He hung his head and sucked in ragged breaths, trying to get air past the overpowering pain and exhaustion. It felt like he was suffocating._

Natsu sucked in air desperately, panting at the physical exertion as well as because of a feeling of suffocation that wasn't his. The dirt buried itself painfully under his fingernails as he dug and his knuckles scraped against loose pieces of rock, but he ignored the discomfort. He would endure it for the sake of something much more important than a little pain. He focused on the unpleasant sensation, hoping that it would keep him grounded in reality, but pain was something Gray had felt in his last days, and the similarity of the feeling made it even harder to fight back the curse-memories.

_His mind was fuzzy and his senses were dull and seemed to be fading at a rapid rate. He lifted one hand and peered down at it blearily, blinking to clear his hazy vision. His whole hand was trembling violently and he couldn't stop it. It shouldn't be shaking like that. It shouldn't be…_

Natsu's senses were dulling. Not only his sense of time, but also his vision and hearing. All he saw in front of him was an unceasing smudge of brown. It was just dirt, dirt, and more dirt, and he was starting to forget what other colors looked like. And as for his hearing…He couldn't tell if the pained and labored breaths grating at his ears were his own or just a memory of Gray's desperate gasps for air. It frightened Natsu that he was starting to lose track of the fine line between reality and the curse-memories.

_It felt like the curse was trying to hijack his mind as well, clawing at the edges of his awareness and threatening to pull him into darkness. He didn't know what would happen if he gave in to that strange force, but he feared that he would lose himself. It terrified him._

The farther Natsu dug, the harder the curse fought back. It was almost as if it didn't want him to dig up Gray, and was going to try stopping him by bombarding him with these damn memories. But he continued to dig anyway because he wasn't going to give in to some stupid curse. He couldn't afford to.

_Actually, he might be dying. He realized that that was a very real possibility._

Natsu's searching hands hit something hard, and he stifled a yell of triumph. He quickly shoveled the excess dirt out of the hole and brushed aside the fine layer that remained, clearing off the top of a long wooden box. Thank goodness he had finally found it. He didn't know how long it had taken him since his sense of time was so distorted, so he resolved to hurry.

_That was when he gave in, because he really, truly, could not fight this anymore. He let go, barely feeling his legs buckle or the impact of his body hitting the ground._

Natsu grunted with effort as he tried to drag the coffin out of the ground, shaking his head frantically in an attempt to throw off the memories. He had seen these memories many times before and he really didn't need to see them again. It was hard to ignore them when they made him feel so terrible, but he did his best. With one last heave, he managed to yank the heavy box out of the hole and drag it onto level ground.

_His body was rebelling and jerking and bleeding and dying, and it was all he could do to just hang on for a few more moments. And that curse, that sentient thing that wanted to play with his mind and twist his memories and destroy his sense of himself…He had to fight, had to fight because…because…_

Because he needed to see if Gray could be saved. Natsu focused on that thought to keep the curse-memories at bay. Pulling at the lid of the coffin resulted in absolutely nothing, and he cursed silently. Of course they would have sealed it. He considered just burning a hole through it, but quickly rejected that idea. If he had to re-bury the body then he didn't want to leave it in a coffin full of holes. Plus he didn't want to risk damaging Gray. So, with a grimace, he began tugging at the lid and using the tiniest sliver of magic to try loosening it. As soon as he started prying up the lid, the curse went crazy, fighting him with a renewed sense of desperation. Natsu absently wondered when he had begun thinking of the curse as a sentient thing, but then again, Gray had thought that way too.

_And then there was only the pain again, for a constant companion, and the curse that he fought tooth and nail, even though he was starting to lose traction in the fight. He didn't know how long it had been before the slimy thing invading his mind finally found a weak point and broke through. One minute it was just pain, and the next the curse was sucking him into memories._

Natsu surfaced with a gasp and yanked at the lid desperately. The curse was strong and it was inexorably wearing him down. He needed to hurry before he lost himself to it completely. With one final creak of protest, the coffin's lid finally shuddered and lifted. Natsu overbalanced and fell forward in surprise at the sudden lack of resistance. He quickly sat back on his heels and peered into the recesses of the coffin, holding back a horrified wail.

_He felt the shot go straight through his chest._

_Looking down, he could see the gaping hole there._

_He blinked at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, watching the_

_blood_

_pour_

_down._

There was blood everywhere, crusted and dried on what was left of Gray's skin. Natsu dry heaved as he saw the holes torn in Gray's body, and he was suddenly glad that he hadn't eaten anything today. He wanted to scream his pain and loss to the skies, because know that he had seen the bloodied and torn remains of Gray's body, he knew that there was no way to save his friend.

_he could feel the searing pain as they shot him full of holes until_

_there was nothing left of him._

_It was just pain and blood and screaming._

Natsu clapped his hands over his ears to blot out the sound of remembered screams. There was nothing left. God, there was nothing left. There was no way that this broken, mangled thing was Gray. He stared in horrified fascination at the gaping hole in his friend's forehead, as if his gaze could magically make it seal up again. With a whimper and a gasp, he finally averted his eyes, unable to look at the grisly sight any longer. Looking past the tombstone in a daze, his eyes suddenly narrowed as they locked on a little smudge of white amongst the jungle of vines. There was another one of those small white flowers growing there, like the one he had taken home with him and buried. Something about the sight of those fragile, ice-like petals drew his attention away from his horror and despair. It was trying to tell him something.

_And then there was_

_one_

_final_

_shot_

_to his head, and everything went_

_blessedly dark._

Natsu yanked himself out of the memory, focusing on the flower instead of the memory of Gray's death. His eyes widened in sudden understanding. The memory of Gray's death. That was it! He forced himself to look at Gray's mangled body again and to really take it in. All that blood, all those terrible, fatal holes…They didn't belong there. Everyone had told him that Gray had had seizures and coughed up blood and lost himself, but none of those things would have torn such frightful holes in the ice mage or left him covered in a thick layer of dried blood. No, the only thing that would have done that was his death at the hands of the dragonlings, and time had rewound so that he had come back to life then, no matter what the curse wanted him to think. Natsu could almost swear that he felt the curse react to his discovery with anger and more than a hint of desperation as it renewed its attack on him.

_there was nothing left of him._

But there  _was_. Natsu narrowed his eyes in determination and stared hard at the body. There! There was a slight shimmer at the edges, as if an illusion was wavering under his scrutiny. Natsu bared his teeth in a feral grin as he began tearing at the illusion, peeling away layers in the quest to see what was underneath the lies.

_It was just pain and blood and screaming._

It took all of his energy just to push aside these curse-memories trying to convince him that Gray was dead, but Natsu kept right on fighting. His tenacity was rewarded when he finally clawed off the last remnants of the illusion, to reveal Gray's still form beneath. The ice mage was as pale as death, his skin almost white against his dark hair, and he wasn't breathing, but he was  _whole_. He was whole and his body was perfectly preserved. Natsu wanted to cry in relief.

_And then there was_

_one_

_final_

_shot_

Natsu shoved aside the curse-memory impatiently, not fooled by its insistence on Gray's demise. The memory-illusion over Gray's body kept trying to creep back to enfold it again, but he fought against it. He didn't want to see that horrific image of Gray again, even if he knew that it wasn't true.

_one_

_final_

_shot_

The curse seemed to be breaking down in its panic, showing fragmented bits of memory over and over again like a broken record player. Natsu ignored it and staggered to his feet, lifting Gray's motionless body with a grunt. He needed to get out of here and show the others what he had discovered.

_one_

_final_

_…_

Natsu's eye caught on that little white flower again and he hesitated. He considered picking it and bringing it back with him. Part of the desire stemmed from nostalgia over its predecessor and part came from the nagging sensation that it was reminding him of something important that he still couldn't quite put his finger on.

_…_

_final_

_…_

But if Natsu picked it and brought it with him, it would just wither and die like the other one. He thought that this one should have a chance to live on. Gray hadn't died, so surely this flower deserved a fighting chance as well. And in any case, he could come up with what it was reminding him of later, once he escaped the curse-memories. The curse's relentless assault on his mind was making it difficult for him to concentrate on or clearly think about much of anything at the moment, but once he got out of its range he could figure out what was nagging at him.

_…_

_blessedly dark._

So Natsu clutched Gray's body tightly, ignoring its unnatural stillness and cold clamminess, and began stumbling his way out of the valley, the curse still howling as it fought him tooth and nail. Despite everything, a spark of hope flickered in his chest, and he felt the desperate need to share this hope with the rest of Fairy Tail. The curse crowded out most logical thought, until all Natsu could focus on was the driving need to get to the guild as soon as possible.

_…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear, Natsu. But hey, at least he's finally starting to get somewhere. And yes, the parts in italics are lifted straight from the third part of the prequel.


	4. Ch 3-Natsu takes a corpse into the guild

**Chapter 3**

_(In which Natsu carries a corpse into the guild hall and all hell breaks loose.)_

* * *

The walk back to the city was a hazy nightmare. Time had lost all sense of meaning as the curse continued to gnaw at Natsu's mind, dragging him in and out of memories of death and carnage. The dragon slayer's mind was clouded and unable to focus on anything but putting one foot in front of the other. He had long since realized that it was better not to look at Gray at all. Sometimes his concentration would lapse for a moment and he'd get a glimpse of that terrible, bloodied illusion again. It made him want to scream and cry at the same time, because he knew that Gray  _had_ looked like this once.

But he didn't now. He didn't now, and everyone else had to know that. Natsu needed them to see that there was still a chance to bring Gray back, so he staggered along one step at a time, swaying slightly under the curse's assault and the weight of Gray's limp body in his arms. Every so often he would pause and rest for a moment or two, panting with exertion, before he forced himself to start walking again.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Magnolia came into view. Natsu gasped in relief and paused to rest one more time. He shook his fuzzy head to clear it a little. His mind's functioning had been severely impaired by the constant strain of the curse, but he needed to think this through.

The curse was attached to Gray's body. If Natsu went waltzing straight into the city, everyone he came into contact with would also get swept up into the curse-memories as long as he had the body. Natsu was loath to leave Gray out here, so he would need a way to get him through the city all the way to the guild hall without running into too many people. Well, the dragon slayer knew all the alleys and hidden backways like the back of his hand. He could find a route that minimized contact with unsuspecting civilians and that would have to be good enough.

He hoisted Gray's body once more and headed down to the city. He had the feeling that there was one other detail he was missing, but his mind was too fuzzy to come up with it right now. Oh well. He'd deal with it once it came to that.

He was amazed at how easy it was to get to the guild without being seen. Sure, he had accidentally surprised a young couple making out in an alleyway and a few—okay, several—other people had spotted him as well, but he had been able to get away before their screams attracted too much attention. Plus, despite how terrible the curse-memories were, Natsu had to admit that they were useful to distract people. Once someone got sucked into them, they were too caught up in the memories to scream anymore.

And so, with minimal disturbance to the city at large, Natsu soon found himself standing outside the back door of the guild hall. He briefly considered walking around to the front entrance, but dismissed the idea. The guild opened onto a main thoroughfare and he would surely run into a great many pedestrians if he took that route. His mind might be a little hazy, but he wasn't  _that_ far gone.

Natsu nudged the back door open with one foot and edged inside, careful not to whack Gray into the wall. No one was in the backroom, so he headed into the main hall. If he had been thinking more clearly, he might have decided to leave Gray in the backroom until he explained what he had done to the others, but he was exhausted and under a great deal of mental strain from fighting the curse, so he didn't even consider it.

It was a spectacular mistake.

When he stumbled into the main room, it was already in a state of mild confusion. Natsu absently noticed that a panicked Happy was gesticulating wildly as he talked to an equally worried-looking Lucy. The other guild members who were present had gathered around the pair, all looking slightly concerned as they listened to the conversation and occasionally added their own comments. Gajeel and Pantherlily were among them, and Natsu cursed silently. He hadn't thought that it was  _that_ late, but Happy must have already come back from the fishing trip and realized that Natsu was gone.

"He couldn't have just  _vanished_!" Happy was saying.

Without thinking, Natsu spoke up. "I'm here."

Everyone turned to face him, and he realized his mistake immediately. It was instant chaos. There were a few high-pitched screams as they saw what he was holding. Juvia's eyes rolled back as she fell backwards in a dead faint, but it seemed like she was the lucky one. Everyone else was panicking and shouting, although several of them had glazed over expressions as they were caught up in the memories.

Cursing, Natsu shuffled backwards and laid Gray gently on a table in the other room. He hoped that the dividing wall would provide enough of a defense that the curse wouldn't attack everyone. If Gray was out of sight, maybe the curse wouldn't bother them too much.

He stepped back into the main room, sighing in relief as the curse finally slid away and stopped trying to dig its hooks into his mind. However many hours he had been under the curse's influence had dulled his senses to the point of near-incapacitation, but now that he was free, he was starting to think more clearly again. And because he was thinking more clearly, he finally realized part of what had been bothering him back at the grave, when the sight of the flower had been reminding him of something.

Death was ugly.

That was what he had thought as he had watched his first flower shrivel and die, before he had buried it. Natsu had been so worried about running into people because of the curse-memories that he had forgotten that in everyone else's eyes, he was carrying around a long-dead corpse riddled with holes and covered in dried blood. He belatedly realized that the couple he had run into in the alleyway had probably been screaming because they had seen him lugging a mangled corpse. He had been able to see through the illusion, so he had forgotten that no one else could see what he saw yet. Oops.

Natsu looked around the room contritely as his friends began recovering. Gajeel had managed to revive Juvia, who was now sobbing in his arms. The members who had gotten sucked into the memories were slowly breaking out of their dazes, shaking their heads and blinking about bemusedly as they came back to their senses. No one was shrieking anymore, but people were shouting back and forth in confusion and distress as they tried to figure out what exactly had just happened.

Then Erza noticed Natsu standing there uncertainly, and the others followed her gaze. Suddenly everyone was staring at him. Natsu gulped.

"Uh, sorry?" he said sheepishly.

" _What the hell have you done?_ " Erza demanded, her eyes flashing in anger and pain.

"Well, you see—"

Natsu was cut off by a shriek of fury and grief, and his eyes widened slightly as Juvia came flying at him. The distraught water mage clawed at him in a frenzy, and Natsu stepped backwards and raised his arms in front of his face in self-defense.

"How dare you?" she screamed, tears pouring down her face. "How dare Natsu-san do this to Gray-sama?"

Natsu retreated before her onslaught, unwilling to fight her back. Now that he was thinking properly and had realized what a terrible blunder he had just made, he couldn't blame her for being upset.

"Juvia, listen—"

Juvia was not listening, but her attacks abruptly ceased anyway. Natsu lowered his arms to see that Gajeel had come up behind her and pulled her away. She was still yelling and crying and trying to break free to go after Natsu again, but the other dragon slayer held her fast and pulled her to him, whispering something into her ear. She seemed to shrink into herself and collapse, falling against his chest as she broke into heartrending sobs. Natsu felt terrible.

"You have some explaining to do," Erza hissed angrily as she advanced on him.

The other guild members closed ranks behind her, and although they still looked shocked and grief-stricken, fury was creeping over their faces. Natsu opened his mouth to explain, but he quickly realized that no one seemed to be interested in what he had to say. Everyone was talking at once.

"What in the world possessed you to dig him up?"

"We thought you got over this stupid idea of yours, and now you do  _this_?"

"How damn disrespectful can you get?"

"Being depressed doesn't give you the right to dig Gray up and drag him through the whole damn city!"

"Have you no shame?"

"Will you just listen?" Natsu asked desperately, backing up a few steps in the face of the angry mob. Everyone kept right on shouting. He needed a way to get their attention off of him and onto what he needed to tell them.

"We should lock him up in a goddamn psych ward!"

"I hope you know that you're the one who's going to have to go bury him again."

"What the hell were you  _thinking_?"

"I can't—I can't believe you would  _do_ that."

His feeble attempts to explain himself weren't working; he couldn't get a word in edgewise. Time for a new plan. Taking a deep breath, he shouted as loudly as he could, his roar slicing through the garble of other voices.

"What about the goddamn holes?"

Everyone fell silent momentarily. A few people glanced at each other, lost looks on their faces. They all looked equally confused.

"What are you talking about, Natsu?" Lucy asked, her voice wavering as she stared at him with tear-filled eyes. He had to give her credit—she was always willing to give him second chances.

"The…body. Didn't you see all the holes in it?" He fixed the crowd with a piercing gaze. There were a few hesitant nods as people tried to figure out where he was going with this. "Well, you watched him die, didn't you? You keep telling me over and over again that you watched it. So tell me, where did the holes come from?"

There was a dead silence. Lucy's eyes widened and her trembling hands lifted to cover her mouth and muffle her sudden gasp. The fury in Erza's eyes had faded to a horrified look of almost-understanding. Juvia had twisted away from Gajeel so that she could stare at Natsu slack-jawed with puffy eyes. Wendy snatched up Charle and clutched her tightly to her chest as her wide-eyed gaze locked on Natsu. The she-cat was too shocked to protest. Happy was about the only one who moved, creeping up next to Natsu and looking up at his partner with big, confused eyes.

"What the hell did you  _do_ , Salamander?" Gajeel growled after the shock wore off.

Natsu instantly flared up in response, his eyes flashing with furious indignation at the accusation. "You think  _I_ would do that? I wouldn't tear holes into a goddamn stranger, much less  _Gray_!"

He sucked in a breath to continue his tirade, still unable to believe that anyone would actually think that he would do something so terrible, but surprisingly, Gajeel backed down. The iron dragon slayer let out a breath and looked away.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said wearily, the fight draining out of him. "Sorry," he added as an afterthought.

Natsu was still angry, but he took a deep breath to calm himself. He doubted that Gajeel had seriously thought he would do something like that. It had been a gut reaction to assume that it was Natsu's fault, at least until the other dragon slayer's mind had caught up with his mouth. Even though Natsu wanted to chew Gajeel out some more, he knew that he couldn't afford to start a fight right now. He needed to hurry and explain himself while he had their attention.

"So you can already tell that something isn't right about the body," he continued on. "But think about it. Why would it have those holes?" He turned and gave Juvia a sharp look. "The only possible time he  _could_ have gotten holes like that was when he died during the dragonling attack, isn't that right? We all saw it in his memories, and you were there, Juvia. Doesn't his body look like he was shot through by the dragonlings?"

Juvia's eyes widened even further and she burst out sobbing again. "Yes!" she wailed.

Natsu blinked at her in alarm. "Hey, calm down," he urged. "It's a good thing."

"A good thing?" she demanded through her tears. "A good thing?"

She threw herself at Gajeel again to hide her face as she cried. The iron dragon slayer wrapped an arm around her and glowered over at Natsu as he and Levy tried to comfort the distressed water mage.

"A good thing, huh?" Gajeel growled. "How do you figure that?"

"Maybe if you people would just listen to me for once, I'd tell you," Natsu snapped back, irritation coloring his voice. "It's an illusion."

"An…illusion?" Erza asked slowly, trying to wrap her head around this newest assertion.

Natsu nodded confidently. "I could see through it. Eventually."

He opened his mouth to continue, but Erza suddenly waved a hand to cut him off.

"Look, Natsu, just start at the beginning," she said. Her eyes were still sad and filled with pain and a faint anger, but she looked as if she was finally willing to hear him out. "Right now you're starting in the middle and we're all lost."

Natsu eyed her for a moment. "And you'll listen to what I have to say before dismissing me?" he asked suspiciously.

Erza closed her eyes briefly and nodded. "Yes."

Natsu glanced around at everyone else, and they nodded as well. Some people looked more willing to give him a chance than others, but it seemed like everyone was sufficiently bewildered by the most recent turn of events that they would at least wait to hear the explanation he had come up with, even if they were still upset and half-convinced that he had really gone off the deep end this time.

"Where to start…" he muttered to himself, trying to come up with the best starting point.

There was a slight tugging on his pants, and he looked down to see Happy staring up at him reproachfully.

"How about you start with this morning, when you told me that you were too sick to come fishing," the little cat suggested darkly, his eyes flashing with hurt. Natsu winced.

"Um, yeah…About that…" The dragon slayer paused and let out a breath. Well, this was as good a place to start as any. "So, I wasn't actually sick—"

"Yes, we figured that out," Happy remarked dryly, still looking betrayed.

"Look, I'm sorry I lied to you," Natsu apologized contritely. "I'll take you out fishing another time to make up for it." Happy didn't look appeased, but he held his peace so that Natsu could continue. "Well, I got an idea. You know my theory from before, that Gray isn't dead? Well, I figured that the only way to know that for sure was to look at his body, since that was what really caused the most problems in my theorizing.

"So I decided to go back to the valley and dig it up. I didn't want you all to know what I was doing since you would try to stop me, plus I didn't want to get your hopes up in case I found…well, a decomposing wreck. But I had to go, because I had to know for sure whether there was still a reason to hold out hope. I picked the day of the fishing trip because Happy would be gone for half the day and I'd have an excuse to be away from the guild." He paused and frowned. "I guess it took longer than I expected, since you already knew I was gone by the time I got back. It's hard to keep track of time when you keep getting sucked into those memories. What time is it now, anyway?"

"It's almost noon, Natsu-san," Wendy volunteered hesitantly, still cradling Charle for comfort. He blinked at her in surprise.

"Only noon?" He glanced back at Happy. "I didn't expect you back so early. You shouldn't have come back for hours."

"I went and got them early," Lucy said in a small voice. Everyone turned to look at her and she shuffled uncomfortably. "Well, Happy stopped by the guild before going out with Gajeel and Pantherlily, and he mentioned that you weren't coming with them because you were ill. He asked me stop by in a few hours to check up on you and make sure you didn't need anything. When I went by your house an hour or so ago, you were missing. I panicked and got Wendy and Charle to help me track down Happy and the others and tell them what happened. We all came back here to see if anyone had information on your whereabouts and to set up search parties. That's what we were doing when you showed up."

Natsu let out a breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and pinched the bridge of his nose. Damn, he hadn't even considered that Happy might ask Lucy to check up on him later. He really should have expected it, but he hadn't. Just one more thing he had overlooked.

"Alright," he said tiredly. "I'm sorry I caused everyone so much trouble."

There was a muttered "you'd better be," from somewhere in the crowd, but Natsu ignored it in favor of continuing his story.

"I went back down to the valley and dug up Gray. It wasn't easy because of the memories, of course, but I managed it. When I pried the coffin open, I saw…that." He winced slightly as he nodded towards the backroom where Gray's body now lay. "I guess I didn't react much better than you guys did. But at some point I realized that his body shouldn't have all those holes in it, and I managed to see through the illusion."

"But…Why is the illusion even there?" Mira asked hesitantly, her hands clasped tightly before her as she stared at him with big, sad eyes.

Natsu shrugged. "Something about the curse," he said noncommittally.

He had the feeling that he should know the answer to this question, that it had been hovering at the edge of his mind for a while now, but he still couldn't quite come up with it.

"Well, the curse was showing us memories and things from Gray's death," Lucy said slowly. "But why would it cast an illusion of how he would look like after the dragonlings instead of what he would look like if he'd just died normally and been buried in the ground for a long time? I mean, we saw him die. Why wouldn't it use an illusion that corroborated that?"

Natsu's head whipped up and he stared at her with wide eyes. "That's it!" he cried, the pieces finally sliding into place.

Lucy looked confused. "Huh?"

He began pacing back and forth excitedly, words spilling out of his mouth as he thought aloud.

"You were there to watch him die. I wasn't. That's the reason why only I could come up with some harebrained scheme about Gray still being alive and entertain even a little hope. You all could accept that he was dead because you saw it happen, but I didn't have that kind of closure."

He looked up at the others with almost manic eyes. "Think about it! The curse kept bombarding us with memories of Gray's death so that we would accept it and wouldn't even think about how Memento Mori wasn't supposed to kill. It was a self-defense mechanism—the curse-memories made it impossible for us to question what happened. I couldn't even see any other options until something snapped me out of it.

"And the curse kept showing Gray memories of his other death as a way to get him to accept his death or nonexistence or whatever. That was part of the process of erasing him. But Memento Mori only ever showed us Gray's memories. It showed Gray his own memories and then it showed us his memories as well. If Gray didn't have any memories of how he 'died' a year and a half ago—and he couldn't have, because the curse had been erasing him and his memories aside from the memory of his death by the dragonlings—then the curse couldn't have used his memories to make an illusion of what he would look like after that 'death'. The only memories the curse let Gray keep was an adulterated version of his death at the hands of the dragonlings, before time was rewound. So if it was using Gray's memories to make the illusion, then it had to use his memories of that time, holes and all! After all, Gray didn't actually die a year and a half ago, so he wouldn't have any memories of how he should have looked after being buried."

Everyone stared at him, and quite a few people had wide eyes and gaping mouths.

"That's…actually brilliant," Erza said slowly, "in a completely unbelievable and incomprehensible way."

Natsu nodded, his mind still churning. This was what that first flower had been reminding him of. He had buried it and cried over it because on some level it had reminded him of Gray, and because he had sat there and watched as it slowly died. He had known it was dead because he had watched it die, and that's why the whole experience had had such a heavy note of finality. The experience had been so  _real_  in a way that Gray's death had not, because Natsu had only seen someone else's memories of his friend's death instead of seeing it with his own eyes. Because of that, he had never truly found closure. Instead, he had replayed the memories over and over again, seeking some kind of meaning or acceptance. That discrepancy—between the realness of the flower's demise and the hazy, secondhand nature of Gray's fate—was what had eventually bothered him enough to snap him out of his single-minded obsession with the curse-memories, and that had been enough to let him think clearly—well, clear _er_ —and come up with his theory.

That flower had been a sort of strange stand-in for Gray, in some sense. Natsu had used it to do all the things that he hadn't been there to do for Gray. He had watched it die because he hadn't been there while Gray was dying. He had buried it because he hadn't been there to bury Gray. He had given it some semblance of a funeral and cried over it because he hadn't been there to cry at Gray's funeral. Going through that whole process still hadn't been enough because in the end Natsu had done it all for a flower and not really for Gray, and it had bothered him that he hadn't gotten the opportunity to be there for Gray in the same way. It had made the whole experience of Gray's death seem incomplete and somehow unreal.

He was suddenly glad that he hadn't picked the other flower he had seen in the valley when he had dug up Gray. There was something comforting in knowing that he wouldn't have to see the finality of that one withering and dying as well, especially now that there was just the faintest touch of hope that maybe Gray could be saved.

"Even if your theory is right, what do you propose we do about it?" Laxus asked, still looking skeptical.

"I…don't know," Natsu admitted, grimacing slightly.

It didn't matter that he had come up with this crazy scheme and it actually almost made sense, unless he could figure out where to go from here. He needed a way to get Gray back, and he had no idea how to do that. In fact, he had to admit that even if everything else was true, that didn't mean that Gray could actually be saved at all. It was equally possible that Gray was far beyond saving, but Natsu didn't want to think about that.

"I don't know, it kind of makes sense in a weird way, but…It's still really out there," Levy said quietly. "I mean, that's a lot of pieces you're trying to fit together, but do they actually fit on their own or are you just trying to jam them in?"

Natsu stared back at her wordlessly, unwilling to admit that he feared exactly that in some part of his mind. He had worked so hard to come up with a cohesive theory that he had to wonder if he was just making up ideas that fit with his overarching theory and ignoring any disconfirming evidence. He really didn't want to even consider that possibility.

Then another idea hit him.

"You're going to have to see it yourself."

"See what?" Erza asked apprehensively, caution written all over her face.

"Look, in order for you to really even consider the possibility that we can bring Gray back, you're going to have to be able to see past the curse-memories and illusions," Natsu said grimly. "The only way I could even come up with this scheme was because I could see past them—you all will have to do the same. You're going to have to fight through the memory-illusion on Gray's body.

"Until you do that, I don't think that you can fully believe me. Right now you're still stuck on Gray's death because you saw it and had hard proof that he died. You'll need some more evidence to override what you saw and truly entertain the possibility that it was wrong. You need to see for yourself that Gray is whole."

He looked at them unhappily, knowing that they wouldn't like the suggestion. They wouldn't want to have to see that mangled image of Gray again or experience the memories, but he thought that this was something they had to do. Watching Gray die had had that kind of finality for them that Natsu had experienced when he watched the flower die. They needed to be able to see past that. And no matter how persuasive he was in arguing that Gray was in a state of stasis and his body was whole and unharmed, they would harbor doubt unless they could see it for themselves.

He wasn't disappointed by their reactions. Juvia immediately buried her face in Gajeel's chest and started crying again. Lucy's eyes filled with tears and Wendy clutched Charle hard enough that Natsu was surprised he didn't hear bones snap. Cana had gone white-faced, and she grabbed an entire barrel of beer from behind the counter and started chugging it. The Strauss siblings all clustered together for comfort as they stared at him with wide eyes. Happy made a slight sound and inched closer to Natsu, pressing against his leg. Even Gajeel and Laxus looked sickened by the suggestion, and Erza took a half-step back and looked as if she might pass out.

"Maybe you should just bury him again," Bisca said, her voice wavering as she held onto Alzack for comfort.

Natsu's eyes narrowed. "No. Not as long as there's even the slightest chance that we can find a way to bring him back. Honestly, how will you feel if I just go dump him in the ground again now? You'll always wonder,  _'what if?'_. For the rest of your lives, you'll wonder if you condemned him to death—or nonexistence or whatever—just because you were too afraid to  _look_."

He scowled and looked away. "You think I don't understand that? Why do you think I dug him up in the first place? Because I couldn't bear to spend the rest of my life wondering if this stupid idea of mine could have saved Gray or if there really wasn't any hope to start with. And at that point, I had even less going for me than you guys do now. There's more reason to hope now. Don't throw it away."

The other guild members exchanged looks, but although they were still unhappy, their resistance to the idea seemed to be slowly melting away.

"I still don't like it, but you're right," Lucy whispered, biting her lip. "I don't want to always wonder about what could have happened."

Erza let out a breath and bowed her head. "How are we going to do this?" she asked resignedly, her voice tight with pain and anxiety.

Natsu sighed and rubbed at his eyes for a moment as he considered the question.

"It's not going to be easy. And it'll probably be harder for you than it was for me, because you were actually there when he 'died'. The problem is that you have to do two things at once, and they're both really, really hard to do. First, you're going to have to fight the curse-memories the whole time, because you won't be able to see through the illusion if you're stuck in them. The curse is going to fight back. It started getting stronger and more aggressive when I started trying to clear away the illusion. It's like it gets really angry when you start trying to bypass it. I think it might be even worse than it was when I brought Gray in here a few minutes ago, because now you know that something's off and are going to be trying to find a way around it."

"It'll get  _worse_?" Levy asked, her voice barely above a whisper as she stared at him with frightened eyes.

Natsu grimaced and nodded. "A lot worse."

Levy sidled closer to Gajeel as if for protection, looking even more scared.

"And what is the second thing?" Erza asked, trying to pull everyone's attention away from that last disturbing assertion. "Fighting to see through this illusion?"

"Yes," Natsu confirmed. "And that's going to be difficult too. For one, you'll be distracted by the curse-memories. That will make it hard enough, but just seeing through the illusion is difficult enough on its own. I had a hard time even once I figured out that it wasn't real. Knowing what's real and actually seeing reality for what it is are two completely different things. Just knowing that it's an illusion isn't going to automatically let you see reality."

"Then how  _do_ we see through it?" Cana asked from across the room, her words slightly slurred. A consequence, Natsu suspected, of the predecessor of the beer currently in her hand.

"Well…When you see Gray, what you're going to see is a dead body. You watched him die. His body is full of fatal holes. Everything you see and know and feel is going to point to Gray being dead. And really, that's what the curse wants. 'Memento mori' means 'memory of death'. It wants you to believe that Gray is gone. With all those reminders of death, I think that the best way to go about this is to remember life instead. Don't focus on how you watched Gray die and don't get distracted by the state of his body.

"You need to remember those times from when he was alive. He was always so full of life, you know? Remember one of those incidents. I'm sure you can come up with a few precious memories you have of him. Maybe a time when he comforted you when you cried, or when he made you laugh even though you were losing hope. Maybe a time when you joked together or went on a job together. All of you shared memories with him and were friends with him. He must have meant something special to you, or else you wouldn't be so upset over what happened to him. Surely you can think of some of the good times you had with him. Remember what he was like when he was really alive, before…all this."

People exchanged looks. Some still looked frightened out of their minds or sickened by the coming ordeal. But some were starting to look more resolute. Lucy looked up at him, and although her eyes were still sad and frightened, a determined look had spread over face.

"Alright. Let's do it."

Natsu nodded at her approvingly. Her fierce determination was spreading to the others as well. Even though they were clearly afraid of what might happen and saddened at the reminder of Gray's fate, they were all willing to do whatever it took in one last final attempt to save their friend. And even if he couldn't actually be saved…Well, Natsu rather thought that everyone at least wanted to understand what had really happened to him.

"Are you—?" Natsu started, before Erza cut him off preemptively.

"We're ready," she said firmly, eyes hardened with steely determination.

There were several nods from the assembled mages, some more hesitant than others. Natsu took a steadying breath. He wished that they didn't have to do this, because it would hurt. He would know. After all, he had already experienced it himself, and it had definitely hurt. But this was too important and they would have to do it anyway. He would always try to spare his friends pain, but this time he just couldn't.

"Alright," he said. "Shall I bring him out?"

Erza nodded. "Hurry up."

Tilting his head in acknowledgement, Natsu turned to go to the backroom once more. He didn't hold Erza's abruptness against her. Everyone would want to get this over with as quickly as possible to allay the suspense and do their part before they lost their nerve.

Grimacing and steeling himself for the onslaught of memories, Natsu quickly strode into the backroom and towards the table he had draped Gray over earlier. The curse began attacking him as soon as he laid eyes on Gray again, and for a moment he could see that terrible vision of his best friend lying dead, shot through with holes and covered in a crust of dried blood. Blinking rapidly, he forced the illusion away and held it at bay as he carefully picked Gray up with a grunt and returned to the main room.

This time the guild's reaction was less dramatic, but no less heartbreaking. Juvia immediately let out another wail and tried to hide her face again, but Gajeel gently forced her to look. Erza stared at Gray with narrowed eyes, but under her firm exterior she had a fragile appearance. Lucy and Levy had grabbed onto each other and looked terrified, but they both looked at the body, their eyes filled with tears but also with determination. No one else screamed or cried, but there were a lot of drawn faces and soft curses.

Natsu watched them carefully as they stared at Gray. He winced and pursed his lips. It didn't look like it was going well. Lisanna and Mira already had glazed over looks as they lost the fight to the curse-memories. Even the people who hadn't yet succumbed to being pulled fully into the memories were clearly not seeing through the illusion.

"I—I can't," Lucy gasped, tears streaming down her face.

Natsu looked around frantically. He was losing them. They were giving up. He couldn't let them give up—not when they were this close.

"Don't you dare give up!" he shouted, torn between desperation and indignant anger. "Don't you dare give up on him!"

"I don't want to," Cana ground out, her expression a mixture of pain, frustration, and grief. "But I can't break through it."

No, no, they were not going to give up now, not when there was so much to hope for. If they could just break through the illusion once, that would be enough. He needed a way to help them see through it.

"Come on," he urged desperately. "Remember a time when he was alive. Remember a happy time you had with him. Or a time he helped you and you could feel how much he cared about you."

He had a sudden, wild hope and turned to Juvia. The water mage had been in love with Gray. Perhaps she was the best equipped to fight the illusion.

"You loved him, didn't you?" he asked her, watching as her tears intensified. "Think about that! You need to feel it—feel that love you had for him. What is it that made you fall in love with him? What is it about him that made him so special? Think about that! Think about the first time you realized you loved him. He was so damn  _alive_. Can't you  _remember_?"

Juvia was crying so hard now that Natsu wondered if she could see Gray through her tears at all. She didn't reply to him, but she fixed her watery gaze on Gray's unmoving body and narrowed her eyes in concentration. There was a new, hard set to her jaw that told Natsu that despite her tears, she had taken him seriously and found a new reserve of determination. For a few seconds, nothing happened. And then she was suddenly screaming.

"Juvia sees him!" she wailed. "She sees him!"

She lunged forward, surprising Natsu, and ran her fingers over Gray's pale face and through his hair. Natsu let out a sigh of relief that sounded almost like a strangled sob. She had seen through the illusion. He wasn't the only one. And if she had seen through it, then the others could too.

He turned his desperate gaze back to them. They still had that terrible, hopeless look, but Juvia's sudden declaration had caught their attention. They looked back and forth between Juvia and Gray as if in a daze. Which to be fair, was probably accurate considering how fuzzy Natsu's own state of mind was at the moment. Fighting off a curse could do that to a person.

"Don't you remember how he would always get into brawls with me and we'd fight until we didn't have any energy left?" Natsu swallowed hard, fighting back tears as he thought of those days when Gray was so full of life. Damn, he missed those days. "Or how he was always the first one to jump to our defense if someone messed with us? Don't you remember that cocky half-smile? Or the way he would fight anything for you just to make you stop crying? Don't you remember his laugh? That stupid stripping habit of his? The way he'd laugh at you and tease you but still stand by you through everything?

"Don't you want to see those things again? The curse wants you to forget those things, but don't you dare. You need to remember.  _Remember him_."

He panted slightly from the combined effects of his passionate speech and his unending fight with the curse. He stared at his friends pleadingly. He needed them to remember. They needed to remember Gray. Not Gray's death, not Gray's body, but  _Gray_.

More than a few people had started crying during his speech, but it looked like some of them were taking his words to heart.

"Yeah," Lucy whispered. "He was always such a good friend. I miss the way he was."

"Well, there might be a chance to get him back," Natsu answered gently. "You just need to fight. He always fought for you. Now it's your turn to fight for him."

Her eyes welled with more tears, but she sniffed and wiped them away as she nodded sharply. "Okay."

Juvia glanced back at them, finally tearing her gaze away from Gray's body. "Juvia sees it too," she said. "Gray-sama looks like himself. Natsu-san is right—this is only an illusion."

"Oh my God, I see it," Cana breathed suddenly, her eyes growing as wide as saucers. "Shit. He looks like he's just sleeping."

Natsu's head snapped towards her and he felt a surge of hope.

"I see it too," Lucy said after a moment, her voice filled with awe as she stared at Gray's face. "How could we have missed that?"

After that, it was like the floodgates were opened. Suddenly it seemed like most everyone was tearing through the illusion at once. Hopelessness was giving way to awe and a tentative new hope and elation as people began talking excitedly about the possibilities at hand.

Natsu glanced around the room, noting that almost everyone seemed to have finally broken through. He could tell because they had a new light in their eyes. Now that he had made them see what he saw, they would need to brainstorm a way to get Gray back. In order to do that, he supposed that he would have to put Gray back in the other room. They might have seen through the illusion, but the curse was still bombarding them with those terrible memories, and it would be too hard to plan and come up with ideas while constantly fighting the curse.

"Are we all good now?" Natsu asked. "Can I go put him back?"

He looked questioningly at Erza since she was nominally in charge, but she said nothing. Her head was bowed, her face curtained by her red hair so that he couldn't see her expression. He waited a moment more, but she still didn't respond. He felt his heart twist. Perhaps she hadn't been able to see through the illusion and that's why she was so upset. He felt terrible about it, but if she hadn't been able to break through by now, he doubted that she ever would.

"Go ahead," Lucy said quietly, after a long pause.

Natsu nodded and disappeared into the backroom. He carefully laid Gray down and escaped as soon as he could, feeling his tension drain away as he left the room and the curse finally let go of him.

"Now what?" Lucy asked after a moment.

Natsu didn't know what to say to that. He hadn't really thought this far ahead, and he didn't know where to go from here. In the week and a half since he had come up with this crazy idea that Gray wasn't dead, he had never managed to come up with a way to bring his friend back.

Luckily he didn't have to respond, because that was the moment Erza finally looked up. Although there were tears slipping silently down her face, she too had that special light shining in her eyes, along with a steely determination.

"We're going to sit here and come up with a plan, and then we're going to move heaven and earth to get Gray back."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you didn't really get the explanation, just know that it hinges on two basic things: memories and the idea of "erasing" Gray. First off, Memento Mori, although never explicitly tied to memories in canon, literally means something like "memory of death", which is where I got the idea of using the repeating memory of Gray's death (both from the dragonlings and after he "died" this time). And keeping in mind that Mard Geer said that Memento Mori was meant to obliterate someone from existence rather than kill them (because it was meant for Zeref), I chose to go the route of having the curse try to completely erase Gray but run into resistance from his devil slayer magic, which made the erasure incomplete. The memory of his death by the dragonlings was part of the curse's method of erasing Gray's identity and sense of self as it tried to erase him.
> 
> I also needed some sort of reasoning for why the curse might attack everyone else with memories after Gray "died", and the idea of some sort of self-defense mechanism occurred to me. Like, Gray isn't exactly dead and if anyone stopped to think about it, they might realize that Memento Mori was never actually meant to kill and start asking questions. Gray's dramatic "death" and then the constant reminder of that from the curse-memories would prevent that, and the illusion on Gray's body would act as another safeguard. Note that all of these things rely solely on *Gray's* memories. Since Gray wouldn't have any memories of this "death", the curse would have had to use the memories of his other death in the illusion.
> 
> And yes, the guild's reaction was a lot milder than I could have made it. It's mostly because I was impatient to get through this chapter and rushed it. My bad.


	5. Ch 4-Fairy Tail schemes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a lot of talking, but it's necessary for the guild to come up with a plan of action. This kind of story necessarily requires a lot of setup and background. Although I actually had some fun with all the crazy theorizing, writing it all out was a pain in the neck.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

_(In which Fairy Tail schemes.)_

* * *

It was a full blown war council.

The Fairy Tail mages had assembled en masse around one of the long tables in the guild hall. Some sat on the benches, while those who couldn't fit stood behind them, occasionally leaning forward to get in on the action or accentuate a point. All of them had a fierceness and resoluteness about them as they schemed, their earlier skepticism and disbelief mostly on hold for the moment.

"What happened here doesn't make sense," Erza began. "We're on uncertain ground. Memento Mori shouldn't have done this, whatever 'this' is. Right now our best explanation is the theory that Natsu proposed, so that's what we're going to work off of."

She looked back over at the dragon slayer. She wasn't crying anymore, but her eyes had taken on a distinctly predatory glint that belied her calmness. There was an underlying viciousness and anger that Natsu knew stemmed from her fury at what the curse had done to Gray. There was hope as well, and perhaps regret that they hadn't noticed all this sooner, but right now she had pushed that to the side in favor of a cold determination that marked her as preparing to go into battle mode. She had immediately taken over control of the planning discussion and was pulling out all the stops—she hadn't been kidding when she said she'd move heaven and earth to undo the harm that had been done to their friend.

"So let's clarify a few things first," she continued, still looking at Natsu. "First off, Gray isn't dead. Or we're assuming that he isn't really dead, seeing as his body is actually perfectly preserved, when it should be decomposed by now. We know that the main purpose of Memento Mori is to reduce someone to a state of nonexistence. Gray didn't disappear right away, presumably because of his devil slaying magic, but judging from his memories of his last days, we can conclude that the curse was breaking him down and making him lose himself. How exactly that process worked and what the end result actually was has yet to be determined, but we'll worry about that later.

"Now the real question is, where is Gray? It's possible that the part of him that made him Gray was broken down entirely and no longer exists, but if that was the case then it would be more likely that his body would have decayed naturally. Since it seems to have been frozen in stasis, it seems plausible that Gray too was similarly 'frozen'. If that is the case, then there might be the slightest chance that we can find a way to bring him back.

"Natsu, what you're proposing is that there might be some kind of pocket in reality—what we might call a pocket or zone of nonexistence, for lack of a better term—that Gray could have gotten trapped in, where he is in some kind of stasis or some incomplete state of nonexistence. Correct?"

Natsu nodded, eyeing her with something approaching awe. She had managed to take all of his barely coherent ramblings and half-formed ideas and present them clearly and logically. If he had been able to explain himself that clearly, perhaps the others would have believed him sooner. Then again, perhaps not. It still sounded pretty crazy, logical or not.

"And you're basing this off of a similar experience you once had, so you believe that there is a way Gray can break his way out?"

"Yes," Natsu agreed.

"Despite everything, we're basically still just theorizing. We have no real proof that Gray is somehow alive or that there might be a way to save him even if he is. This is a complete shot in the dark, but we have at least some plausible reasoning for how this whole thing might have happened. I know that it still seems like we might be facing a dead end, chasing an impossible dream, but for now we need to try to look past that. At least we have a chance, and we can't afford to give up on that now. For the purposes of this discussion, we need to set aside any lingering doubts and uncertainties and assume that Gray is alive and that there is a way to bring him back, if we can find it. We'll find out later whether we're right or not, but for now, let's assume that we are.

"So now we need to come up with a way to find Gray and bring him back. Any ideas?"

There was a long silence. Natsu bit his lip, unwilling to admit defeat. The theorizing phase had been all well and good, but he didn't have any idea of where to even start actually rescuing Gray. That was one of the reasons he had been so determined to get the rest of Fairy Tail to accept his theory: because he needed their help and had hoped that they would have some ideas to get them started. Unfortunately, everyone looked as lost as he did.

"Well," Lucy said hesitantly after a long, awkward silence, "how exactly did you break out of that spell Zero cast on you, Natsu?"

Natsu blinked at her owlishly for a moment and then shrugged. "It was really hard for me to focus on what was important when I got stuck in the Land of Nil. I was giving up without even realizing it, but then I heard Igneel, or a memory of him or something. He helped remind me of what was important and made sure that I kept on fighting. I guess that reminder was all I needed to break my way out. Of course, I didn't really pay attention to how all the details of that spell worked, so I don't really know if there's even a point of comparison here."

"What's important?" Cana mused, resting an elbow on the table and propping her chin on it as she stared at the woodgrain thoughtfully. Apparently she was perfectly content to ignore Natsu's last cautionary statement. "I suppose that Gray would have forgotten all of that by the end."

"Yeah, that's what the curse was taking away from him," Lisanna added.

"By taking away Gray-sama's memories," Juvia murmured, her eyes downcast. She hadn't said much since she had seen through the illusion. She sat between Gajeel and Lucy and kept her head down so that she didn't have to look at anyone.

"It all comes down to the memories, doesn't it?" Mira remarked.

"Well, I suppose that isn't surprising," Erza said. "'Memento mori' does mean 'memory of death'. And honestly, all it has done is screw around with memories. It took most of Gray's memories and left him with only a fuzzy version of the memory of his previous death. Then it used the memory of his most recent 'death' to make us accept its reality, and the illusion on his body also came from his memories.

"If we consider the main point that Gray losing his memories was what ultimately made him lose his sense of self and the knowledge of what was important to him, then it looks like bringing him back might involve memories as well. If we need to remind him of what's important, then do we need to find a way to give him back all the memories he lost?"

Everyone latched onto that idea immediately. It was the first concrete suggestion that had been proposed so far, and it was the only thing they had to build off of at the moment.

"That makes sense!" Lucy exclaimed excitedly, tapping her fingernails against the table as she thought through the suggestion.

"Yeah, but how could we possibly do that?" Gajeel asked bluntly.

"Uh…"

The excitement slowly drained out of everyone's eyes as they searched for possibilities and came up emptyhanded. Natsu wanted to smack Gajeel for trying to take away what little hope and eagerness the others had just found, but sighed instead. He supposed it wasn't fair to blame the other dragon slayer. After all, they needed someone to look at their ideas critically and point out the flaws so that they could find a way to address them before moving on. And occasionally they needed someone to be the bad guy and point out the obvious things that none of them really wanted to admit.

"What about that guy Gray fought during the Grand Magic Games?" Levy asked hesitantly.

Everyone looked at her in confusion as they tried to figure out who she was talking about.

"You mean Rufus?" Erza suggested after a moment.

Levy nodded. "Didn't his magic have something to do with memory?"

Natsu blinked at her for a moment, before feeling a surge of hope. "Yeah," he agreed. "Memory-make magic. When he was fighting he mostly memorized other mages' techniques and used his magic to copy them, but a couple times it looked like he could somehow see into other people's memories and recreate them. Like with the snow guy from Blue Pegasus."

"Would that work?" Lisanna questioned skeptically.

"Dunno, but it's the best lead we've got right now," Cana said with a shrug. "Not gonna say that I have a clear understanding of how his magic works, but I think we might have an issue with it. If we wanna use it to show Gray his memories, I think Rufus would have to have access to Gray's memories. If Gray doesn't currently have any memories…"

Natsu grimaced slightly, not wanting to give up on this possibility yet. "But  _we_ have memories of Gray," he insisted. "I mean, it won't be the same as his own memories, but maybe if Rufus could use our memories of him, it would be enough to help him regain his own memories or at least break out of the curse."

"Hm, that might work," Erza said slowly. "But I think that the main problem hasn't really been solved. Even if we can use Rufus's magic and it works, how will we get that magic to Gray? We don't know where Gray is or how to reach him or even what state he's in right now. How can we even try to get him?"

There was a long silence.

"Well, damn," Cana grumbled. "I actually kinda liked that idea."

"We don't have to give up on it yet," Natsu contradicted stubbornly. "We just need someone else's magic to bridge the gap so that we can use Rufus's magic."

"Maybe," Bickslow said flatly, speaking up for the first time, "but then again, we don't even know if Rufus could do anything. We don't know enough about his magic or the situation Gray is currently in."

Natsu scowled, not appreciating the reminder.

"Hey," Lucy said suddenly, leaning forward and studying Bickslow with new eyes. "You can see souls, can't you? If we could find a way to at least narrow down where we could find Gray, do you think that you could search for his soul and find him?"

Natsu gaped at her wordlessly, amazed that she had even thought of that. He thought it was a very encouraging idea since all evidence seemed to point to the fact that Gray's soul wasn't currently with his body. That suggested that the piece of Gray that was left, the piece they were looking for, was his soul or something similar. Bickslow rocked back on his heels as he considered the question.

"If a few conditions are met, then I suppose I could. But we'd have to at least find a place to start looking for whatever 'pocket of nonexistence' we suspect Gray to be in. I can't just roam the world looking for him and expect to find anything. And we'd also have to assume that Gray's soul still exists. If it doesn't, we're wasting our time. There isn't any way we could bring him back without his soul. Assuming that it still exists, there is always the chance that the curse mutilated it in some fashion. If that's the case then I can probably find it—if we narrow down our options of where he might be, of course—but he might not be the same even if we bring him back."

Natsu swallowed hard. He hadn't even considered the possibility that Gray's soul could be damaged, and he didn't want to think about what that might mean for his friend.

"How—How likely is that?" he asked hoarsely, his throat suddenly dry.

Bickslow looked over at him contemplatively. "That his soul is damaged? Pretty likely. I don't know  _how_ damaged it might be, but it's quite likely that it sustained some injury. The curse was destroying him and taking away his sense of himself. That sounds like it was trying to erase his soul as well.

"Now, if his soul was completely erased or destroyed, I would think that his body would have decayed like normal dead bodies do. The fact that it is perfectly preserved and unchanged from a year and a half ago suggests that at least some part of his soul exists and still has some kind of tenuous link to his body, so that's a good thing. But it's hard to imagine that the curse did no lasting damage when it attacked him so mercilessly."

"If we find Gray and bring him back, what might some of the side effects be?" Lucy asked softly, her face stricken.

Bickslow grimaced faintly and shrugged. "It's impossible to tell. It could affect him in any number of ways, and there's no way to know ahead of time. But I have to warn you that there is a very real possibility that he won't be the same."

"That's a risk we're going to have to take," Erza said firmly, her tone brooking no argument.

"Agreed," Bickslow replied mildly. "But the fact remains that if we want any part of him back at all, we're going to have to come up with a way to find out where his soul might be."

No one could argue with that, and silence fell once more as everyone tried to think up a way to find Gray.

"Maybe Minerva could help?" Erza suggested finally.

"Why Minerva?" Mira asked curiously.

Erza hesitated a moment as she mulled over her response. "Well, she uses magic that manipulates spaces," Erza explained slowly, considering her words carefully. "You remember during the Grand Magic Games when she created pockets of space outside the normal dimension, where she trapped Lector and Milliana? I'm not overly familiar with her type of magic, but the fact that she can make isolated pockets of space and trap people in them makes her relevant to this conversation. I mean, she trapped people, bodies and all, and Gray's body is still here, but if this 'pocket of nonexistence' is in any way similar to how Minerva's magic works, then maybe she would have some insights to help us. Perhaps she could even use her powers to locate the specific space we're looking for."

There was a moment of silence as everyone considered that suggestion.

"Would she help us?" Natsu asked doubtfully.

"If she could, she would," Lucy answered. "She settled down a lot after Tartaros and we're on pretty good terms now."

"Then I think it's worth a shot," Natsu concluded.

"It sounds like a long shot, but it's all we have to go on right now," Gajeel admitted, somewhat reluctantly.

"Alright," Erza said. "So as of now, the plan is to get Minerva and Rufus from Sabertooth. We'll see if Minerva can find where Gray's soul is trapped, and Bickslow can confirm if it's there. If we can find it, then we'll see if Rufus can use our memories to strengthen Gray's connection to his body and this world so that he can come back."

"Yeah, when you put it like that…It still seems like a long shot," Gajeel commented. "Maybe it would be a good idea to come up with some kind of backup plan? In case this plan doesn't work?"

"You could ask Gemini, I suppose," someone said from behind Natsu. The dragon slayer twisted around on the bench and raised an eyebrow at the person standing just behind him.

"Loke?" Lucy asked in surprise, doing a double take as she noticed the celestial spirit. "When…? What are you doing here?"

Loke crossed his arms and stared at her shrewdly from behind his tinted glasses. "I was friends with Gray too, you know," he said quietly.

The simplicity and emotion behind that statement made Natsu feel bad that he had forgotten about the spirit. Loke and Gray had been close friends for years, since long before they had even found out that Loke was a celestial spirit. Of course Loke would be interested in trying to save Gray.

Lucy also looked contrite. "Of course," she agreed softly. "I'm sorry I didn't think to invite you out."

Loke just shrugged. They stared at each other for a moment longer, before Lucy shifted uncomfortably and continued speaking.

"What did you mean about Gemini?" she asked.

"I'm not saying that this will work, mind you," Loke cautioned, not wanting to get her hopes up. "Gemini can transform into someone and learn things about them. It's possible that they could help you find out where Gray is from whatever they can pick up from him."

Lucy brightened instantly. "That's a great idea! Why didn't I think of that?"

Loke didn't share her enthusiasm. He stared at her somberly.

"Honestly, it's just as likely that it won't work," he said. "If Gray's soul is gone, it's possible that Gemini won't be able pick up anything useful from his body. There might not be anything left there for them to find. In addition, this could pose some danger to them. I don't know how the curse will react to their powers, or what effect trying to duplicate a soulless body might have on them."

Lucy deflated a little. "Do you really think it could be dangerous? Maybe it's better if I don't ask them."

"Summon them and ask," Loke advised. "Although I'm sure that they'll be willing to take the risk for you."

Lucy hesitated, torn between her desire to take the opportunity to do something that might help Gray and her worry of unintentionally bringing harm to her spirits.

"Go ahead," Erza urged. "It's worth a shot."

Lucy nodded slowly and took a deep breath as she fumbled for her keys and summoned Gemini. The twin spirits popped into existence on the tabletop.

"Lucy!" one said. Natsu could never tell which one was which.

"How can we help you?" the other asked.

"I have a favor to ask of you." Lucy bit her lip before continuing. "I'd like you to try duplicating Gray to see if you can pick up any useful information from him. We aren't sure if you'll be able to get anything from him, and Loke thinks that there's a possibility that the curse might react badly to your magic. It's only fair to warn you that there is some risk involved."

The twins didn't look surprised by any of this or ask why she was talking about Gray when the other mage had died a year and a half ago, and Natsu wondered how much the spirits knew about the situation at hand even though they had been in the celestial spirit world. He supposed that Loke seemed to always have ways of knowing when things were going on in the outside world, so maybe it shouldn't be surprising. Or perhaps Loke had been passing information along.

"We'll do it," the twins said in unison.

Natsu tapped his fingers on the table impatiently as Lucy gave them some last minute instructions and they disappeared into the backroom. No one wanted to go back there again unless they had to, so the spirits were on their own for this part. There was a tense silence as all eyes locked on the door to the other room. The other mages could take this time to continue strategizing, but everyone was too impatient and tense as they waited to hear if Gemini could help.

"Do you think something went wrong? Should I go get them?" Lucy asked worriedly after the twins didn't appear for several long minutes.

"Give them a little more time," Loke answered, his gaze never wavering from the door they had disappeared into.

Sure enough, the twins stumbled back into the room a few seconds later, looking disoriented and a little worse for wear.

"What happened?" Lucy demanded, her voice laced with concern. "Are you alright? Did you find anything?"

"Sorry," one said.

"There was nothing to find," the other added.

"He was empty."

"No soul."

"Faint traces of something about a blue-haired girl and getting killed by strange creatures—"

"—But nothing else."

"Dangerous to interfere with the soulless."

"Too easy to lose yourself."

"We had to pull out before—"

"—We got stuck in the void."

"We're sorry," they finished in unison.

Natsu let out a breath and bowed his head. Loke had warned them not to get their hopes up, but the dragon slayer had to admit that he was feeling pretty let down nevertheless. He hated the deflated feeling that came along with Gemini's failure.

"It's alright," Lucy said, disappointment coloring her voice although she tried to conceal it. "I'm just glad you stayed safe. Thank you for trying. You're free to go."

She dismissed them and the gathered mages sat quietly as they digested this newest setback.

"Sorry," Loke said. "I didn't mean to get your hopes up."

"No, thank you for the suggestion," Lucy told him. "The more suggestions we come up with, the more likely we'll find one that will work. We have to expect some failures before we find a viable option."

"Lucy's right," Levy agreed. "We need to come up with some more ideas in case the one with Bickslow and the Sabertooth mages doesn't pan out."

There was a faint murmur of agreement, but everyone knew that Levy's advice was easier said than done. They had already stretched the limits of their knowledge and creativity in coming up with possible routes to take. No one seemed to have any other suggestions.

Then Juvia spoke up again. "Meredy-san," she said simply, finally looking up as she pulled herself out of the reverie she had been lost in throughout most of the conversation.

"Eh? Meredy?" Lucy asked.

Understanding slowly crept into Erza's eyes. "Her sensory link magic," she said, a thoughtful expression spreading over her face. "That's actually a really good idea. Maybe if she could link one of us to Gray, we'd be able to pick up on something that Gemini couldn't."

"That sounds like dangerous magic," Loke warned.

"Gemini said something about how it's easy to get lost when you're trying to become one with a soulless person," Mira agreed. "This sounds like it could follow the same principle. We might also lose whoever we send after Gray."

"But Gemini was trying to connect with Gray through his body and they couldn't reach his soul because it wasn't there anymore," Lucy argued. "Maybe Meredy's sensory magic could link us directly to Gray's soul, in which case we might be able to actually find him."

"Couldn't that make it even more dangerous?" Wendy asked in a small voice. "Gemini was having enough trouble just linking to Gray-san's body. If we link directly to his soul, wouldn't that make it even more difficult for us to remember ourselves and find our way back?"

"Of course it's a risk," Natsu interrupted, eyes flashing, "but it's one I'm willing to take."

"It might not even work at all," Erza added. "I don't fully understand all of Meredy's magic, but her magics that I've seen usually seem to be linking two people's senses or otherwise manipulating someone's senses. Usually those are the bodily senses—I'm not sure if she could link directly to someone's soul or not. If she can only link us to Gray's body then I doubt we'll have any more success than Gemini. And even if she could create a soul-link, I'm not sure if it would work in this case, when Gray's soul is probably in some kind of limbo."

"But it's still worth a shot," Natsu insisted heatedly. "Does anyone have any better ideas? It's not like we're coming up with tons of ideas here. We should pursue any leads we get."

"Calm down, Natsu." Erza raised her hands in a placating gesture. "We aren't saying that we aren't going to try it, but it doesn't hurt to discuss the possible consequences and obstacles too. Although I'm sure that Meredy herself could give us a better idea of what to expect."

"If we can find her," Lisanna piped up. "I mean, do you have any idea of where Crime Sorcière is right now?"

Erza bit her lip and looked away. "No," she said flatly.

"I'm sure we can find them," Gajeel said unenthusiastically. "Eventually."

Natsu grimaced. And there was just one more slight hitch in their plan. Crime Sorcière never stayed in one place for long and never broadcasted their whereabouts. It was nearly impossible to tell where they would be at any specific time. Even Erza wouldn't know, despite how close she was to Jellal.

"Juvia is good friends with Meredy-san," the water mage said suddenly, as she returned her gaze to her lap. "Juvia can contact Meredy-san."

"You can?" Erza asked in surprise.

Juvia only nodded and lapsed into silence. No one pressed her for more details, although Natsu could practically feel them burning with curiosity. He wondered how Juvia could have contact with Meredy if Erza couldn't just contact Jellal whenever she wanted to. The thought occurred to him that maybe Meredy's sensory magic played a role, but he didn't really know.

"Alright then. Does anyone else have any other ideas?" Erza questioned.

Everyone thought about the possibilities for a few more minutes, but no more plausible suggestions were raised. It looked like they only had two ideas to go on, and each one seemed to offer only the slimmest glimmer of hope. Natsu wished that they had been able to come up with other alternatives in case these failed, but at least they had something to work with now. If worst came to worst, they could come up with more plans later. Hopefully.

"Okay, so here's what we're going to do," Erza started, when it became apparent that no one else had anything more to offer. "Juvia, you contact Meredy, however it is you do that. The sooner Crime Sorcière gets here, the better. In the meantime, we'll send someone to Sabertooth to ask Minerva and Rufus for help."

"Should we contact Lyon too?" Cana asked.

Wendy winced automatically. "I'm not sure that's a good idea," the girl replied. "Lyon-san was devastated by what happened to Gray-san. Perhaps it would be best if we didn't contact him until we know for sure if we can bring Gray-san back."

Erza nodded her agreement. "Best not to get his hopes up until we know whether or not this is even possible. I would hate to tell him about this and then find out that there's no way to save Gray after all. He was in bad enough shape after Gray died the first time. I can't imagine how broken he would be if we gave him false hope that Gray was still alive."

Natsu grimaced faintly and dropped his gaze to the tabletop. He had to agree with the girls' assessment of the situation. He hadn't been there when Gray 'died', but he knew how close Lyon had been to his adoptive brother.

"Honestly," Erza continued, "I wouldn't even tell Sting and Rogue if I could help it. They were pretty shaken up over the whole ordeal too. But if we're asking for Minerva and Rufus to help us, they'll have to hear about this scheme as well."

Natsu winced again. The Sabertooth dragon slayers  _had_ seemed pretty upset over everything when he had talked to them a few months ago. He could see Erza's point, but they needed Minerva and Rufus.

"Alright, is everyone clear on the plan?" Erza asked.

Everyone nodded, and more than a few people were looking more hopeful and eager to get started now that they had a concrete plan of action to carry out. Erza smiled wolfishly, her eyes gleaming in anticipation of one of the most important fights of their lives.

"Then let's do it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hm, I wonder who isn't going to be happy when he finds out that he was left out of all the scheming...? XD
> 
> I guess it would be prudent to mention that I might be taking a few liberties with some people's powers here, although I don't do anything that explicitly goes against canon. Like, Rufus uses his magic (it pains me to define it as molding) mostly to mimic the powers of opponents he's seen before, but there was also that scene where he fights Eve and apparently pulls one of his memories of Ichiya and plays it out. So I'm not doing anything super crazy with it, but I am expanding on things a little. It's necessary, since most mages' powers aren't very well-explained in canon.
> 
> This "pocket of nonexistence" stuff is also kind of a mouthful, but it will get new terminology later. I basically took the idea from Minerva's magic and, to some extent, Zero's spell with the Land of Nil. Both those types of magic transported the victim's entire body to some kind of alternate dimension or pocket of space or something, so they're not an exact match to what I'm doing here, but I'm not just pulling stuff out of thin air.


	6. Ch 5-Plans are set in motion

* * *

**Chapter 5**

_(In which plans are set in motion.)_

* * *

Sting and Rogue immediately looked uneasy when Natsu walked into Sabertooth's guild hall, and the Fairy Tail mage couldn't blame them. The last time Natsu had come here was several months ago, when he had first learned of Gray's death and had requested that the Sabertooth dragon slayers tell him everything that had happened. He reflected that he really should have come back to see them again afterwards, but he had been too caught up with his own grief and the curse-memories to even consider it.

"Is everything alright, Natsu-san?" Sting asked hesitantly as the Fairy Tail mage approached the table he and Rogue were seated at.

"Boy, do I have a story to tell you," Natsu remarked as he stopped in front of them. "I need to talk to you and Rogue. We're going to need Minerva and Rufus too and I'd rather only tell the story once, so if they're here, can you call them?"

The twin dragon slayers exchanged puzzled glances, but seemed slightly reassured that Natsu wasn't in as volatile a state of mind as he had been the last time they had seen him.

"I'll go fetch them," Rogue said.

He stood and walked away, quickly disappearing into a knot of gathered Sabertooth wizards. Natsu tapped his fingers impatiently on the table as he waited for the other man's return. Now that there was a plan to try rescuing Gray, he was impatient to put it into action, and it had left him tense and keyed up.

"How are things at Fairy Tail?" Sting asked conversationally as they waited.

Natsu smiled faintly. "All shaken up," he remarked dryly.

Sting arched an eyebrow and a worried expression stole over his face again. "Is something wrong?"

"Yes and no," Natsu answered, shaking his head. "Things are maybe better than they have been, but we're looking for a way to set them right again."

Sting looked perplexed and rubbed at his eyes wearily. "I don't even know what to make of that," he commented.

Natsu spotted Rogue heading back towards them, Minerva and Rufus trailing in his wake.

"Well, it looks like everyone's coming, so I can explain."

"You need us for something?" Minerva asked pointedly as she stepped around the table and sat down beside Sting. Rogue resumed his previous position on Sting's other side, and Rufus claimed a spot next to Minerva. The four Sabertooth mages watched Natsu curiously, nonplussed by his odd request. Natsu just nodded.

"Now that you're all here, I have a story to tell you. Ask questions if you must, but please pay attention because I'd rather not have to repeat it." He grimaced at the thought. "It's kind of long and really…unexpected."

"'Unexpected'?" Minerva repeated warily. "What do you mean, 'unexpected'?"

Natsu huffed impatiently. "You all are as bad as Fairy Tail," he griped. "If you just listen, I'll tell you."

Minerva rolled her eyes but subsided into silence.

"It all started when I got the idea that Gray wasn't actually dead."

Now  _that_ elicited a reaction. The Sabertooth mages' eyes got wider and wider as they listened to his tale. There were frequent questions and startled sounds of disbelief, and quite a few skeptical comments that showed that they weren't quite sure whether or not to believe such a strange story. Natsu was as patient as possible with the interruptions even though he wanted nothing more than to steamroll over them and continue on with the story. After all, he would have a hell of a lot of questions if someone waltzed into Fairy Tail and started telling him a story like this. Besides, he needed their help, so it was best to humor them.

Natsu concluded the main portion of the story with a brief recounting of what had transpired when he had carried Gray into the guild hall and everyone else had had to fight through the illusion like he had. Then he paused to let them digest this information. There was a long moment of silence as they stared at him with a mixture of shock and awe.

"What are you going to do now?" Rogue asked finally. "I mean, whether or not you're right and have a chance…" He trailed off and shook his head. "Do you have a plan to get him back?"

Natsu smiled faintly. "That's why I'm here," he said. "We don't have a whole lot to work with, but we managed to come up with two different plans. Not sure if either one will pan out, but we're going to try. One of our plans involves the two of you."

He nodded toward Rufus and Minerva, who looked thoroughly confused.

"What could we possibly do in a situation like this?" Rufus asked helplessly. "That sounds like one powerful curse, and I wouldn't have even the faintest idea of how to start dismantling it."

Minerva nodded in agreement. "I'd help if I could, but I don't know how much help we would really be."

"Well, at least hear me out first," Natsu pleaded. "We have some logical reasoning behind it. First of all, Memento Mori is all about memories." He nodded at Rufus. "We think that if some part of Gray still exists somewhere, it might be trapped because he can't remember much of anything anymore. He lost all meaning and sense of self when the curse ate away at it and took his memories. We're assuming that if we can somehow give him his memories back, he might be able to break free of whatever the curse is using to chain him."

Natsu watched Rufus as the memory-make mage considered the feasibility of what was being asked of him.

"Well…Under normal circumstances I could recreate things I find in other people's memories. Those things could, I suppose, jog someone's memory, but that's a rather circular argument, isn't it?. In order for me to create something from someone's memory, they necessarily have to remember it. And if they remember it, then they wouldn't need their memory jogged. If Gray lost all his memories before his 'death', then I won't have anything to work with even if we  _could_ find him, which is a whole other issue entirely. I wouldn't be able to do any of this unless we could actually find Gray."

"Yes, actually finding Gray is something we have another plan for," Natsu conceded. "But suppose that we  _did_ find him. Do you think that you could use  _our_ memories of him to create something to help him remember himself?"

Rufus bit his lip and his brow furrowed as he stared blankly at the table and thought through the proposition. He stayed silent for a few more seconds before his eyes cleared and he looked up again.

"Technically it would be possible for me to pull your memories of him and create something with them. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that they'd be enough to make him remember those things for himself, and I'm not sure my magic would even work properly in…What did you call it? A 'pocket of nonexistence'?" He shook his head uselessly. "I have no memory of anything like this ever happening before. I am unsure if my magic would help."

"But if we could find him, would you try?" Natsu asked, his voice taking on a pleading edge as he stared at the other man. Rufus hesitated a moment before nodding.

"Of course. I may not have known him very well, but I remember that he was a good man and a powerful mage. I would help him if I could."

Natsu nodded in satisfaction at the reassurance. His gaze travelled to where Minerva was sitting.

"Just finding Gray will be hard enough," he continued. "We thought that you might be able to help us, Minerva. Well, Erza suggested it anyway. She thought that perhaps since your magic manipulates spaces it might help you find whatever space Gray is trapped in, whatever that might be. She said something about how you managed to trap some people in your pockets of space during the Grand Magic Games?" He shrugged. He hadn't actually seen it for himself since he had been busy rescuing Lucy at the time. "I don't know how similar that is, but she thought it was at least worth considering.

"And if you could at least narrow down our search area, we think that Bickslow could help you find him. He can see souls after all, so presumably he would be able to recognize Gray's if he saw it. The main issue is that we need a way to find at least an approximation of Gray's location first. Do you think that your magic could help?"

Minerva let out a breath and grimaced. "Honestly, I have no idea," she said. "It's true that I'm able to create what you might call temporary pockets of space where it's possible to store objects or people. However, I'm not sure if the mechanism I use is similar to the one that the curse uses. Even if the end result is the same, the process to get there might be different, and that may or may not affect whether or not I can use my magic to find him. I've also never created a space where time freezes or simulates nonreality, which is what you seem to assume is happening with this curse. If that pocket of space  _is_ distorting reality in such a way, it might make it even more difficult to locate. On top of that, I store physical objects, not…souls. I've never seen anything where a soul is separated from a body in the way you are suggesting.

"This is such a novel and unusual situation that I don't really know what to expect, so I don't know if I could really be of service to you here. If nothing else, it's an interesting idea that has some measure of promise. I'll help you if I can."

Natsu let out a sigh of relief as he realized that both Rufus and Minerva had agreed to help. He smiled at them gratefully.

"All we ask is that you try," he said.

Sting shifted slightly. He had been following the conversation with a great deal of interest, and now he felt the need to speak up.

"Is there anything Rogue and I could do?" he asked. "You wanted to talk to us too."

Natsu pursed his lips. He understood that Sting was eager to help in any way possible and was desperate to be useful. It was only to be expected, especially since he and Rogue had watched Gray die after being tacitly tasked with looking after him. Sadly, Natsu couldn't come up with anything that the twin dragon slayers could help with.

"Sorry," Natsu said regretfully. "I don't think so. To be honest, we probably wouldn't have even told you guys about what was going on unless we actually managed to revive Gray, but since you're the leader of Sabertooth and we needed to request help from some of your guild members…"

Sting sighed and seemed to deflate a little, but he nodded in resigned understanding. Rogue didn't seem bothered by the exchange, but was still watching Natsu with a small frown, as if he was trying to puzzle something out.

"You said that you had two plans, right?" he asked finally. "What is the other one?"

Natsu blinked at him momentarily before he smiled a little. Leave it to Rogue to pick up on that.

"The other plan involves Meredy. Juvia is trying to contact Crime Sorcière right now. I'm not sure how much you know about Meredy, but she uses sensory link magic that can link two people's senses together. We're hoping that if she can link one of us to Gray then we'll be able to figure out where he is and what's going on with him."

"Sounds like a lot of things could go terribly wrong," Minerva commented.

Natsu sighed. "So everyone keeps saying. But if it means that we have a chance to get Gray back, I'll be willing to take that risk."

"Just be careful," Sting cautioned, his voice taking on a worried edge. "We don't want to lose you too."

Natsu shrugged dismissively. To be honest, his own safety wasn't his main concern right now. He had left Gray behind, and now he was going to fight to the bitter end to correct that mistake. He noticed that Rogue was watching him knowingly, and he got the feeling that the shadow dragon slayer had a pretty good idea of what was currently going through his head.

"It's understandable that you feel the need to make up for what happened," Rogue began mildly, "but remember that neither Fairy Tail nor Gray will thank you if you get yourself hurt through reckless actions."

"Yes, yes, I know," Natsu grumbled. He wasn't a complete fool.

"I assume you want us to come back to Fairy Tail with you then, right?" Minerva asked, giving Natsu an opportunity to extract himself from the previous line of conversation. He jumped at the chance.

"Yeah. We figure that Rufus will need all of us around if he's going to use our memories, and it seems more appropriate to conduct the rescue mission at our guild. Besides, that's where Gray is."

"Um…About that," Sting interjected hesitantly. "We aren't going to have to deal with those memories again, are we?"

Natsu just shrugged. "As long as he's in a different room, that won't be an issue. And we only need Minerva and Rufus anyway, so you don't have to worry about anything."

Sting and Rogue exchanged looks before frowning back over at Natsu.

"You don't really think that we're going to stay here, do you?" Sting asked.

Well yes, that is indeed what Natsu had been thinking, but now that they said something, he had to admit that he wasn't really surprised at this turn of events.

"We watched him die too," Rogue said quietly. "We were with him when he fell. If there's a chance that he could be brought back…We want to be there to see it."

Natsu dipped his head in acknowledgement. "You are, of course, welcome to come."

And with that, Sabertooth came to Fairy Tail's aid once more.

* * *

Natsu was unnaturally still as he watched Minerva work. His attention was wholly focused on her, and he hardly dared to even blink on the off chance that he might miss something important.

Of course, just because he was paying attention didn't mean that he really understood what was going on. Minerva had attempted to explain what she was trying to do with her magic back when she had first started…this…but most of it had gone over Natsu's head. He took a little bit of comfort in the fact that almost everyone else—the other Sabertooth mages included—were also more than a little confused. Minerva had had a difficult time explaining some of the more complicated aspects of her magic, and had eventually thrown her hands up in frustration and given up. After all, it didn't really matter if everyone else understood her reasoning. The most important thing was getting Gray back, and they didn't need a full understanding of Minerva's magic for that.

So Natsu remained blissfully ignorant, blithely pushing aside all of Minerva's talk of magical signatures and alternate dimensions in favor of simply watching her like a hawk. He thought that he understood the most basic idea, and that was enough for him. From what he could tell, Minerva had been trying to tell them that there were a number of alternate dimensions running parallel to their own. Apparently it was possible to 'pinch off pieces' of those other dimensions to make temporary 'pockets' of space where people or objects could be stored. Those pockets would be set aside from the other dimensions so that they occupied a little space all their own until their creator disbanded them and they stretched back out into their original place in whatever dimension they had come from. It was all terribly confusing.

He hadn't even bothered trying to understand Minerva's explanation of how she was searching for this specific pocket, but he had gathered enough to know that she was having a hard time and didn't have a lot to go off of. Something about needing more information about what type of pocket the curse had created and what dimension it had come from. She had tried explaining about the different types of pockets and dimensions, but it had made Natsu's brain hurt.

He wasn't very clear on the method she was using to search for Gray or how it was working, but it seemed to involve a lot of intense concentration and muttered cursing. Her strange, swirling magic had been popping up all over the place and she seemed to be manipulating it to do something or other. She had already been at it for a few hours, and everyone was starting to lose hope at this point.

Rufus was leaning against the far wall as he watched Minerva carefully, but he hadn't moved in quite a while. His services hadn't been necessary so far, and it was starting to seem like they never would be at this rate. After all, Rufus wouldn't be able to even try to help unless Minerva could find Gray.

Natsu was suddenly jerked out of his musings by Minerva's voice.

"Bickslow? Try this one!"

Her voice had taken on a hopeful note that it had been lacking for the past couple hours, and it grabbed Natsu's attention. The dragon slayer leaned forward in his seat and watched with bated breath, his heart in his throat. Minerva had stretched her hands out in front of her, and a swirling globe of muted colors floated between her fingers. Natsu wasn't sure what it was exactly, but if he had to guess, he'd say that it was some kind of doorway to one of these dimensional pockets, as Minerva called them.

Bickslow stood up from where he had been sitting with the rest of the Raijinshuu and moved to her side. He tried to maintain the appearance of casualness with his leisurely pace, but his movements were just a hair too sharp and hurried, and Natsu realized that he was just as keyed up as the rest of them. Bickslow lifted his visor and peered at Minerva's…magic thing. For several long seconds he stared at it, his strange eyes darting back and forth as he repeatedly scanned the area.

Then he sighed and stepped back. Shaking his head, he let his visor drop back down into place.

"There's nothing there," he said regretfully.

There was a collective exhale as everyone in the guild hall suddenly remembered how to breathe again. Natsu could hear Juvia whimpering off somewhere to his left, but he didn't have the heart to really care. This was the third false alarm they had had today, and he couldn't take it anymore. Screw the whole 'not missing a thing' outlook. He glanced past Minerva, towards the closed door of the backroom where Gray's soulless body lay.

Then he stood abruptly, turned on his heel, and walked out of the guild hall. Lucy started to call after him, but someone hushed her. Thank goodness, because Natsu didn't need her concern right now. He couldn't handle it.

He collapsed onto a bench just outside the entrance of the guild and dropped his head into his hands. All this waiting, all these false alarms…they were driving him crazy. He couldn't sit in the guild and watch anymore, because it was tearing his heart apart. If anything happened someone would come get him, but he didn't want to see every last false hope as it played out.

Natsu wasn't sure how long he had been sitting there before someone came up and sat beside him quietly. Taking a sniff at the air, he realized that it was Rogue. Rogue didn't speak, and the two dragon slayers sat in silence for quite some time before Natsu finally stirred and looked up. He saw that Rogue was gazing blankly into the distance, eyes unfocused. He was grateful that Rogue had chosen to remain quiet until Natsu felt up to talking. Right now Natsu didn't want comforting gestures or words, but he had to admit that there was something solid and almost comforting about having someone else beside him, even if they weren't talking. Just being reminded that he wasn't completely alone was enough, even if it was Gray that he really wanted here by his side.

He straightened himself out and rolled his shoulders to get rid of the cramps that had come from sitting in such an uncomfortable position for so long. With a sigh, he leaned against the back of the bench. Sensing Natsu's movement, Rogue glanced over. The Sabertooth mage watched Natsu but didn't speak. Natsu got the feeling that Rogue was waiting for him to speak first, but he was content to wait in silence. He met Rogue's gaze, and after a moment the other dragon slayer dipped his head in silent acknowledgment and resumed his earlier glazed stare as his gaze drifted away again.

The two waited together in tense but companionable silence for well over an hour before Natsu heard someone else emerge from the guild hall. He closed his eyes for a brief moment and let out a breath as he prepared himself for the news. Standing, he turned to see an apologetic Sting shuffling his feet awkwardly. Minerva and Rufus stood behind him, both frowning at the ground. Natsu didn't need to see their faces to know that they had failed. He had already suspected as much.

"I'm sorry, Natsu-san," Sting said finally.

"I tried," Minerva added, "but if Gray is trapped in a dimensional pocket like you think, it's either too hard for me to find or it's not compatible with my brand of magic. I'm sorry."

Natsu grimaced faintly and bowed his head. "It's alright. We knew it was something of a long shot when we asked you," he answered. Part of him wanted to rail against them for failing in such an important task, but he knew it wasn't their fault. Minerva had been searching relentlessly for hours, long after everyone's hope had begun to fade. No one could accuse her of not taking it seriously. "Thank you for trying. We appreciate your assistance."

When he looked up again, he was surprised to see that even though Minerva had her usual cool expression in place, there an edge of regret and sadness beneath her façade. He hadn't expected her to be so upset over failing. She had barely even known Gray and she must have known that she didn't stand much of a chance going into this. But he supposed that she must feel like she had held someone's life in her hands and then watched helplessly as it slipped away, along with everyone else's hopes.

"It's not your fault," he added to her. She bit her lip and nodded before looking away.

"I'm taking Minerva back to Sabertooth," Rufus said, giving his guildmate a sidelong look. "We wish you the best of luck in saving your friend. If you need our help again, let us know and we'll be glad to come back."

Natsu immediately picked up on what the memory-make mage had left out, and looked over at Sting with raised eyebrows.

"And you and Rogue?" he asked.

Sting looked awkward and couldn't quite meet Natsu's eyes as he replied. "I thought…Well, I thought that we might stay here until this whole situation plays out. I just…I need to see him alive again, after what happened. It just…It feels like we failed him, you know? We were supposed to take care of him when you left, and then he died right in front of us. I know there isn't really anything we could have done, but I need to see for myself if he can be saved."

Beside Natsu, Rogue rose to his feet. Natsu glanced over at him, and the shadow dragon slayer nodded his agreement with his friend. Natsu let out a breath. He could understand their need to stay—he himself had felt it. He knew there wasn't any point in telling them not to blame themselves for what had happened, so he settled for the next best thing.

"And where are you planning to stay?"

The twin dragon slayers exchanged looks.

"I suppose we'll find a hotel," Sting answered uncertainly. "There must be some around here."

Natsu was already shaking his head. "No point bothering with hotels when you have friends nearby." He briefly considered whether or not this was a good idea, before forging on. "You two can stay with me and Happy for a few days. I have a spare bedroom."

Sting and Rogue glanced at each other again.

"Are you sure?" Rogue asked cautiously.

Natsu saw the uncertainty in his eyes and thought he could guess why it was there. To be honest, he himself wasn't quite sure whether or not he would regret this. He did have a tendency to sometimes want to be left alone when he was stressed out, and bringing two more people into his home could stretch him to the breaking point. But then again, maybe having other people around would do him some good. He could use a distraction from the waiting, and maybe Sting and Rogue could help him start feeling a little more like himself again.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Might as well."

Despite his apologetic and awkward mood, Sting's eyes lit up at the prospect. Sometimes Natsu forgot how much the younger dragon slayer idolized him. Perhaps bringing an overexcited Sting home with him wasn't the best idea, but he had already committed to it.

"That would be great!" Sting exclaimed.

Natsu eyed him wearily. Rogue picked up on his mood and came to his rescue again.

"It's not a vacation," the shadow dragon slayer remarked, giving Sting a pointed look. "Contain yourself."

Sting shuffled his feet and stared at the ground, abashed. "Sorry," he mumbled.

Natsu started laughing. He couldn't help it. When Sting was excited he could act like a little kid, and watching Rogue scold him was hilarious. Everyone gave him surprised looks and he tried to make himself stop laughing, but found that he couldn't. He doubled over, gasping for breath as he laughed so hard that tears leaked out of his eyes. All the stress and tension of the day was making it impossible for him to stop, and his laughter took on an almost hysterical edge.

"Natsu-san?" Sting asked uncertainly. "Are you alright?"

Natsu nodded jerkily since he still couldn't speak. His laughter was verging on tears now, and he slapped his hands over his mouth in a vain attempt to stop the hysterical sound before it turned into full out sobbing. He was  _not_ going to fall apart right now. He  _wasn't_.

Someone grasped his arm firmly and started tugging him away. He looked up to see Rogue pulling him away from the others, around the side of the guild hall where they were out of sight. Then the other mage released Natsu and leaned against the wall, his arms crossed and his eyes fixed on the ground. He didn't say anything, just waited for Natsu to get his hysterical laughter and sobbing breaths under control.

After a few minutes, Natsu took one last shuddering breath and his hysterics subsided. He rubbed at his eyes to get rid of the residue of tears that lingered there, and looked over at Rogue.

"Thanks," he said forlornly, feeling emotionally drained after his attack.

Rogue shrugged and nodded. He watched Natsu carefully. "Are you sure about all this? We really don't mind getting a room at a local hotel."

Natsu sighed and scrubbed at his face with his hands. "You might as well stay with me. Who knows? It might do me some good to have other people around. Maybe you can entertain Happy, at least. I think I'm driving him crazy."

Rogue still looked uncertain. "Alright, but if you change your mind, you can ask us to leave at any time and we won't be offended," he said finally.

"Okay," Natsu agreed. He looked back towards where the corner of the building obscured his view of the other Sabertooth mages. "I guess we should go back."

Rogue shrugged again. "If you need some time then go ahead and take it. They'll wait," he said flatly.

Natsu took a deep breath to calm himself. He didn't want to make them wait. He had a bad track record of making people wait for him.

"No, let's go." Seeing Rogue arch an eyebrow doubtfully, Natsu huffed out a small laugh. "Really, I'll be okay. It's not like this is the end of the line. Meredy hasn't even tried yet." He nodded to himself as he warmed to his theme. Looking on the bright side was more familiar territory than the terrible hopelessness that had gripped him earlier. "Hopefully Crime Sorcière will be here soon. Juvia said that Meredy was on her way. And really, this sensory link thing was our best bet from the start."

He looked over at Rogue, his eyes shining with a fragile, desperate hope. "She'll be able to find him."

He nodded to himself, trying to convince himself of the truth behind his words. Rogue watched him silently, and his normally cold, disinterested gaze softened slightly.

"Alright," the Sabertooth mage agreed. "Let's go."

The two of them started walking back to join the others, but just before they turned the corner, Natsu stopped abruptly and held out an arm in front of Rogue to stop the other wizard as well. The shadow dragon slayer stopped obediently and studied Natsu with his knowing gaze again.

"What is it?"

Natsu hesitated and then dropped his arm. "Nothing. Just…thanks."

"Not a problem," Rogue said after a moment's hesitation.

"Not just for right now," Natsu clarified, his gaze drifting away. "Thank you for before too, when you came out and sat with me, and…thank you for being honest and blunt with me when I came to you to talk about Gray, instead of treating me with kid gloves like everyone else. And before that…thank you for trying to help Gray after I left, and for staying with him while he…while he…"

Natsu trailed off, his throat closing off as another lump formed there. He surreptitiously swiped at the tears welling in his eyes.

"It's okay," Rogue said quietly. Natsu thought he might add something else, but the other mage was a man of few words.

"I mean, I'm really grateful to Sting too," Natsu added as an afterthought. "He was just as caring as you. But…It just…Ever since you mentioned how you felt like you had a lot in common with Gray…I don't know. You're different from him in a lot of ways, but I think you're right. Once I started thinking about it…you really do remind me of him in some ways."

He sniffed and wiped at his eyes again. Something flashed in Rogue's eyes and he looked away with a grimace.

"I really don't mind leaving."

Natsu blinked at him in bewilderment for a moment, trying to figure out why Rogue suddenly seemed to think that he should leave. Then he sighed as he realized it must be because the shadow dragon slayer thought it was painful for Natsu to see him if he reminded him of Gray.

"Stay," he said quietly.

Rogue hesitated but then nodded slowly, his crimson eyes still conflicted. Natsu took a moment to collect himself and then smiled over at him, his eyes glinting with new determination. He wasn't going to sit here and break down. No, he was going to be positive and optimistic like usual, and things were going to work out in the end.

"Come on," he said firmly.

He resolutely started walking forward again, and after a moment Rogue followed after him. The pair turned the corner and headed back towards the entrance of the guild, where Sting was standing alone, a forlorn look plastered on his face. Natsu glanced about but didn't see the other Sabertooth mages anywhere.

"Where did Minerva and Rufus go?" he asked.

Sting looked up quickly, a strange mixture of emotions flashing across his face in rapid succession as he spotted Natsu.

"I told them to just go ahead and return to Sabertooth." He wrung his hands anxiously. "But I can call them back if—"

"Relax. It's okay," Natsu said quickly, holding his hands up to stop Sting's nervous rambling. He grimaced faintly. "Sorry about all that."

"Natsu-san, are you—"

Sting broke off again as Rogue shook his head sharply. The white dragon slayer bit his lip and looked away, getting the message that he shouldn't keep asking after Natsu's mental state. Natsu appreciated it. He didn't need any more attention drawn to his near-breakdown.

Then Rogue elbowed him in the side and Natsu frowned over at the other mage. Rogue watched him impassively, his crimson eyes giving nothing away. After Natsu stared at him blankly for a moment, he sighed harshly and nodded towards Sting. Natsu looked back over and took in the other dragon slayer's awkward, uncomfortable posture and the defeated, almost broken look in his eyes.

Natsu closed his eyes briefly and let out a breath. He had been so caught up in his own pain and worries that he hadn't paid enough attention to everyone else.

"Sting, I'm sorry. I know it's hard for you too, but you don't have anything to feel bad about. Like you said, there's nothing you could have done. But…thank you. For trying to save Gray and for staying with him the whole time. And thank you for immediately trying to help us when I asked you to. I'm really, really grateful for everything you've done. And look, everything is going to work out. We'll figure out where to go from here."

Sting stared at Natsu wordlessly for a moment before blinking back a few stray tears and nodding.

"Now let's go back in and see everyone, alright?" Natsu pressed.

Both the Sabertooth mages nodded slowly.

"Okay," Sting said in a small voice.

Rogue left Natsu's side to stand by him, and the Fairy Tail dragon slayer smiled sadly. Watching Sting and Rogue reminded him too much of how he and Gray had been. The superficial dynamics of the two relationships were different, but some of the underlying pieces—the important pieces—were eerily similar. Watching them made Natsu's heart hurt, but it also made him want to smile, just a little.

Turning away, he headed back into the guild hall, Sting and Rogue following behind him. It seemed that they had loitered outside the building long enough for everyone else to start calming down from however upset they had been before, but a heavy stillness hung over the guild. The expressions on the other mages' faces ranged from disappointment to grief to hopelessness, and Natsu hated it.

"Well, that was a bust," he said brightly, injecting a falsely cheerful note into his voice.

Several sets of disbelieving eyes locked on his face.

"What the hell is there to be happy about?" Gajeel growled darkly.

Natsu gave him a hard look. He wasn't sure that the other dragon slayer would understand what he was trying to say without words, but Gajeel grimaced and lapsed into silence. Everyone else still looked fairly depressed. Natsu repressed a sigh.

"You said you made contact with Meredy, right Juvia?"

The water mage nodded slightly but didn't speak. She wore a shattered expression.

"Well then, all we need to do now is wait for her to show up. Let's be honest, she's probably our best bet right now anyway. Okay, so this plan didn't work. That's why we came up with another one," Natsu reasoned. "Don't act like you're giving up already. We aren't done yet."

"But what if Meredy can't do it either?" Lucy whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "One plan has failed already. What if we lose our backup?"

Natsu fixed her with a cool stare, and his next words were edged in steel. "Then we come up with another plan. Someday, sometime, somehow, we will eventually get Gray back, because I'll be damned if I give up so easily. Don't give up before Meredy has even arrived."

There was a brief moment of silence.

"Natsu's right," Erza said finally. "No point in losing hope before we even know if the other plan will fail or not. It's not like we're out of options. Chin up, everyone. We'll wait for Meredy."

There was a faint murmur of agreement, and Natsu sighed in relief. He hated to see everyone losing hope like that. He hated to see them as torn up as he was.

He stuck around the guild for another hour or so, but it was already starting to get dark. Minerva really had been searching for most of the day. When dusk settled over the city, Natsu collected Happy, Sting, and Rogue and headed for home. He kept up with Sting's string of chatter halfheartedly as he set the Sabertooth mages up in his guestroom, and then headed to bed. He went to bed not so much to sleep as to wait. He stared at the darkened ceiling long after the others fell asleep, waiting for the woman he hoped could save Gray.

* * *

Natsu didn't know where Crime Sorcière was currently located, but it must have been a good distance away since they didn't show up for days. Those were long, tense, uncomfortable days for Natsu. The guild had regained some semblance of normalcy, but the tense atmosphere never quite went away. It was, after all, impossible to forget that Gray's soulless body was lying locked away in the other room.

And aside from all that, Natsu had a few extra issues to deal with. First of all, Happy was still not overly pleased with him. The Exceed was still trying to be supportive as possible to his friend and was just as excited about Natsu's revelation that Gray wasn't dead as everyone else, but he was still smarting over the deception from that damn fishing trip. He would occasionally make a snippy comment or stare at Natsu reproachfully. That made the first couple of days a little awkward until Natsu did his best to smooth over Happy's hurt feelings with a serious apology and a lot of fish.

The second thing that occasionally got on his nerves had to do with Sting and Rogue. Natsu wasn't used to living with anyone besides Happy and he was already keyed up and tense without the extra intrusion. He didn't regret inviting the Sabertooth dragon slayers to stay with him, but their presence and chatter sometimes ground on his nerves. Although he had to admit that he sometimes found their presence comforting as well, so for now he could deal with bathroom squabbles and Sting's unceasing prattling.

Even so, the tension was so thick that it felt like everyone—especially Natsu—could snap at any moment. So when Crime Sorcière finally did arrive, they were greeted with a great deal of relief and hope. Thankfully the previous members of Oración Seis were nowhere to be seen, so it was only Jellal and Meredy who walked into the guild hall a week after the previous plan's failure.

It was immediate chaos as everyone jumped over themselves to explain the details of everything that had transpired recently, until Erza quickly reasserted order.

"Silence!" she barked.

There was immediate silence. No one wanted to cross Erza when she was serious, and she was deadly serious right now. She quickly recounted their tale as succinctly as possible, her words clipped and precise. When she finished, Meredy and Jellal stared at her wordlessly, disbelief and hope warring in their eyes.

"Do you think you can help?" Natsu asked finally, unwilling to wait any longer for a response.

Meredy looked at him and frowned. "If there's any way to bring Gray back then I would do my best to find it," she said. "He was important to Ultear and Juvia, and I was quite fond of him myself. But what you ask…it's dangerous. I'm not sure if it's even possible or not. I mean, if Gray's soul exists somewhere then performing a sensory link on one of you could probably find it, unless something blocks my magic.

"But what Lucy's celestial spirits have said is true. This is an unprecedented chain of events, so we have no idea what might happen. In order to find Gray I would need to use someone who has a very close bond to him, but we could end up losing that person too if anything goes wrong. I've never linked anyone to a wandering soul before."

"Is it Gray's body you'd be linking us to or his soul?" Erza asked. "You once said that your magic transmits sensations and feelings, but not physical effects. However, you also said that the exception to that was death. If Gray  _is_ in some kind of state of nonexistence, do you think that linking one of us to him could also drag us into a similar state?"

The pink-haired girl sighed and shook her head helplessly.

"I don't know. Nothing like this has ever happened before. But…if the curse doesn't stop my magic then I think that it could be a very real possibility. Linking someone to a soulless body…Well, I've never linked anyone to a corpse before, but I imagine that it might follow a similar principle if it's actually possible. A sensory link connects both the body  _and_ the soul to another person. It's a complete melding of  _all_ the senses, although we mostly focus on the physical aspect. I really don't know what would happen if I tried to link one of you to someone whose body and soul are separated."

She hesitated and bit her lip. "I want Gray back too, but honestly…I'm not sure that I feel comfortable doing this. I'm afraid of what it could do to you."

There was a pause as everyone considered that.

"We've already come this far," Cana said eventually, breaking the silence. "It would be a waste to back out now."

Erza nodded. "I'm sorry to ask you to do this Meredy, but this is a risk we're willing to take."

Meredy's face had paled and her hands trembled slightly as she took in everyone's determined expressions. It was clear that she would rather not do something that could potentially destroy one of them.

"Will you do it for us?" Lucy asked. "No one will blame you if anything goes wrong. We know the risks and we're willing to take the chance anyway."

Meredy looked at Jellal helplessly, but he just shrugged.

"It's your decision to make," he said, resting a supportive hand on her arm.

She looked between Jellal and the rest of Fairy Tail, and then at the door concealing Gray's body.

"Alright," she said finally. "I'm not sure it's a good idea, but if it's what you want to do…"

"It is," Erza said firmly.

Meredy sighed. "Who am I going to link?"

Chaos broke out again as several people immediately volunteered and then worked to convince everyone else why they should be the ones to go. Natsu scowled. He understood why they all wanted to do this despite the risks, but he had little patience for them right now.

"Me," he said flatly, his voice slicing through the sea of noise.

"Natsu, no—" Erza started before he cut her off.

"It has to be me," Natsu repeated firmly, his eyes flashing.

"But Natsu—" Lucy tried.

"No," he snapped. "I'm the one who left him behind and didn't even know he was dead until a year later. I left him, and I'm the one who's going to bring him back. This is nonnegotiable. I have to do this."

"It's not your fault, Natsu," Erza protested, her voice soft.

"It doesn't matter," he countered coldly. "I left him. I'm bringing him back. End of story."

A few of his friends still looked as if they'd like to protest, but they reluctantly backed down when they saw the steely determination in his eyes and realized that this was a fight they couldn't win. He also liked to think that at least a couple of them understood why he needed to be the one to do this. He turned back to Meredy.

"Do we need to be by Gray's body for this to work, or can we do it out here?"

She shook her head. "No, we don't need direct contact or anything like that, as long as I can be touching one of you. We can do it here if you want."

"Then do it," he said.

She hesitated a moment more, her eyes torn with indecision.

"Please, Meredy," he whispered.

Meeting his gaze, her body slumped in resignation and she nodded.

"Okay. Here goes."

One moment she was casting her spell, and then everything suddenly went black.


	7. Ch 6-Natsu enters the void

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did expand on Meredy's magic a little here. In canon I believe it's implied that strong emotions can be transferred through the sensory link in some way, but I expanded that. In this story emotions can be transmitted through the link as well as physical sensations, for a few reasons.
> 
> Also, this chapter is going to be a little...different. It was honestly kind of impossible to write, in its own way, but I did the best I could here. The parentheses are back and some of the repetition from before - I'm so sorry x.x

* * *

**Chapter 6**

_(In which Natsu enters the void and learns about the nature of nonexistence.)_

* * *

It was black.

(Was it?)

At least, Natsu thought it was. It was hard to tell since everything seemed to have disappeared. He tried opening his eyes to see if there was anything beyond this darkness, but he didn't seem to have any eyes here, wherever here was. It was as if his body had disappeared in its entirety, and he was just floating along in…nothing?

(There was nothing.)

He tried to call out, but he had no voice left. Despite that, he thought he felt something stirring and noticing him with faint interest, although he couldn't say how he knew that, except that he could  _feel_ it.

(What was this?)

Natsu slowly became aware of sensations that were not his own, if they could be called sensations. It was more a feeling of heavy emptiness that seemed foreign to him. Was it Gray's? He tried reaching out towards it, but then he suddenly found something at last. It grabbed him and swamped him with hazy recollections and washed out memories.

_…_

_He needed to tell her something, this blue-haired girl._

_But as he was opening his mouth, he saw one of those beasts rise up behind her—one of those dragon spawn creatures they had been fighting._

_And it was going to shoot her while she wasn't looking,_

_so without thinking,_

_he pushed her out of the way._

_He felt the shot go straight through his chest._

_Looking down, he could see the gaping hole there._

_He blinked at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, watching the_

_blood_

_pour_

_down._

_And then there was the screaming—that blue-haired girl and another girl and a man. He looked up to tell them that_

_it was okay,_

_but then more dragonlings appeared, and_

_he could feel the searing pain as they shot him full of holes until_

_there was nothing left of him._

_It was just pain and blood and screaming._

_And then there was_

_one_

_final_

_shot_

_to his head, and everything went_

_blessedly dark._

_…_

Time rewound.

_…_

_He needed to tell her something, this blue-haired girl._

_But as he was opening his mouth, he saw one of those beasts rise up behind her—one of those dragon spawn creatures they had been fighting._

_And it was going to shoot her while she wasn't looking,_

_so without thinking,_

_he pushed her out of the way._

_He felt the shot go straight through his chest._

_Looking down, he could see the gaping hole there._

_He blinked at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, watching the_

_blood_

_pour_

_down._

_And then there was the screaming—that blue-haired girl and another girl and a man. He looked up to tell them that_

_it was okay,_

_but then more dragonlings appeared, and_

_he could feel the searing pain as they shot him full of holes until_

_there was nothing left of him._

_It was just pain and blood and screaming._

_And then there was_

_one_

_final_

_shot_

_to his head, and everything went_

_blessedly dark._

_…_

Time rewound.

_…_

_He needed to tell her something, this blue-haired girl—_

_…_

Natsu fought his way out of the endless cycle. Time had rewound, but it had had rewound so that Gray  _hadn't_ died. It hadn't rewound so that he could die over and over again. Whatever part of Natsu was here in this strange place knew this, but he was feeling hazy and disoriented, and it was difficult to keep track of what was real and what was not.

(Losing himself.)

But he still fought, because this was not what had happened. It definitely wasn't. He forced the strange memories back firmly. In response, he felt a stirring as something seemed to come into awareness. He tried speaking again and found that he still couldn't. But if his senses were linked with Gray's, then perhaps he could communicate without words. He wasn't exactly sure how he projected his thoughts without a voice, but they seemed to echo in the void nonetheless.

_"Gray?"_

(That was…a color? What was a color, really?)

There was a pause of indeterminate length as Natsu waited in the stillness. He continued to keep the curse-memories firmly at bay, and it seemed to do the trick since he could feel Gray reviving somewhat. Or, at least he thought that might be what that funny feeling was. It definitely wasn't his own feeling, to be sure. Well, probably. It was hard to tell what anything was here.

_'Who are you?'_

Natsu felt a stab of pain at that. It was good that Gray was here and could communicate—and Natsu could tell that this was Gray, even though it felt so much different from the friend he had known—but if he didn't remember anything…

_'What is that?'_

Gray's question was faintly curious and almost puzzled. Natsu didn't know what he was referring to.

_"What is what?"_

_'That…feeling, is it?'_

(Strange sensations. So different from emptiness.)

Well damn. Natsu should have seen this coming. Bickslow had warned them that Gray wouldn't be the same, but Natsu hadn't realized what exactly that would entail. If Gray had been in this… _nothingness_ for a year and a half, of course he wouldn't remember much of anything from the outside world.

And, Natsu realized with a jolt, if he himself didn't get out of here soon, he might not either. Since he was linked to Gray and his sensations, Natsu could already feel that pervading nothingness eating away at him the same way it had consumed Gray. A lot of the details of the outside world were already becoming fuzzy and distant in his mind.

(Because even if there was something outside, there was nothing here.)

But it must work the other way too, since Gray could feel the things Natsu was feeling. If Natsu could transfer enough of his emotions and senses through the link, perhaps he could remind Gray of the things he had forgotten. It wasn't exactly memories, but it would have to do. Natsu and the others had assumed that Gray's lack of memories would be the main issue, but it was starting to seem like the problem was more pervasive and severe than they had realized.

The alien presence that was Gray seemed to shift about—not literally, of course, since it didn't have a body or any corporeal presence—when Natsu didn't answer its question. It made Natsu uncomfortable because from the things he was picking up through the link, this didn't really feel like Gray. Well, there was just a hint of the ice mage lingering at the edges, but everything else was taken up by a yawning emptiness. It was an empty, lonely feeling that Natsu supposed was the feeling of nonexistence. Although it must only be an incomplete nonexistence, or no part of Gray would still be here at all. Natsu supposed that this adulterated version was the result of Gray's devil slayer magic clashing with the curse.

_'How did you make it stop?'_

_"Make what stop?"_

_'The screaming. The blood. The blue-haired girl.'_

He must mean the memories. Natsu felt a jolt of excitement. The only thing that could have pulled Gray out of the memories was the fact that Natsu had fought his way out of them. Since they were sense-linked, Gray would be able to sense how Natsu wasn't experiencing the memories, so he had been pulled out of them as well. If Natsu could keep fighting the memories then he could keep both Gray and himself from falling back into them again.

_"Because I found my way out of them, so you did too."_

_'Hmm…'_

Gray's wordless reply was vague and uninterested. Natsu felt a stab of panic as he realized that he was losing his friend. Gray was losing interest in him and starting to drift away again. Natsu didn't know how to describe it except as 'drifting'. It felt almost like Gray was trying to fall back into unawareness again.

_"Where are you?"_

_'Where…am I? Nowhere.'_

_"Where is everything?"_

_'There is nothing.'_

_"There's us."_

_'I am nothing. You…I don't know what you are. What are you?'_

_"I'm_ something _. So are you."_

_'I don't understand.'_

Neither did Natsu, although his confusion wasn't the same as Gray's. Gray no longer understood the concept of existence, of  _being_ —Natsu knew, because he could feel that vague bewilderment through the link. What Natsu didn't understand was the concept of  _non_ existence. Some part of Gray clearly still existed, but couldn't even recognize what it was. Natsu didn't know how to fix that. Existing was something that came naturally to him and that he took for granted. After all, of course they existed. How could one not exist? He didn't know how to explain something so fundamentally simple and yet so terribly complex to someone who no longer understood even the basics of life.

_"You can think and feel. How can you be nothing?"_

(Because nothing existed.)

_'I don't know. Am_ I  _thinking and feeling? Or is it just_ you _?'_

_"Of course I'm thinking and feeling too."_

_'Yes, you are. But am_ I _?'_

_"What do you mean?"_

_'I wasn't thinking or feeling before you showed up. You say I can feel the things you feel. So am I really feeling at all, or are you just feeling for me?'_

Natsu paused at that. If he still had a body, he thought he might be feeling nauseous. He didn't know how to answer that and wasn't sure that he really wanted to because he had a bad feeling about what the answer might be, so he floated in silence for a time, if time still existed here at all. Of course he wasn't really  _floating_ , but that was the closest analogy he could come up with. Just like Gray was ill-equipped to understand existence because he knew nothing of existing, Natsu was incapable of truly understanding what type of artificial nonexistence he was experiencing here, because all he knew was existing. The concept of nonexistence was too alien to even wrap his mind around. Gray couldn't understand Natsu because he didn't understand how anything could exist at all, and Natsu couldn't understand Gray because he didn't understand how anything could exist but apparently not exist at the same time.

Natsu meant to think about an answer to Gray's question, but after a time he realized that he had begun to just drift mindlessly. His awareness was fading out and spreading, as if he could no longer maintain a unified presence because he was no longer a person. He panicked.

(He was losing himself.)

He was letting Gray's sensations—or lack thereof—get to him. The ability to think rationally was born of an understanding of himself and his world, which was a cornerstone of his existence. When he let himself drift instead of actually thinking, he was losing his sense of self and letting himself get caught up in the mindless emptiness of Gray's world that was coming through the link. And that meant that he was not only losing himself but Gray as well. He needed to focus. He needed to…needed to…

_…_

_He needed to tell her something, this blue-haired girl._

_But as he was opening his mouth, he saw one of those beasts rise up behind her—one of those dragon spawn creatures they had been fighting._

_And it was going to shoot her while she wasn't looking,_

_so without thinking,_

_he pushed her out of the way._

_He felt the shot go straight through his chest._

_Looking down, he could see the gaping hole there._

_He blinked at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, watching the_

_blood_

_pour_

_down._

_And then there was the screaming—that blue-haired girl and another girl and a man. He looked up to tell them that_

_it was okay,_

_but then more dragonlings appeared, and_

_he could feel the searing pain as they shot him full of holes until_

_there was nothing left of him._

_It was just pain and blood and screaming._

_And then there was_

_one_

_final_

_shot_

_to his head, and everything went_

_blessedly dark._

_…_

Time rewound.

_…_

_He needed to tell her something, this blue-haired girl—_

_…_

Natsu pulled himself out of the almost-memories. He wasn't quite sure when they had started up again because it was a hazy, nebulous, only half-there sensation, but he realized that he had been very close to being caught up in the cycle for good this time. The only thing that snapped him out of it was the jarring feeling of wrongness that came when time rewound just so that Gray could die again, because Natsu absolutely knew that that wasn't what had happened.

Natsu worked to pull himself together again, finding all the pieces of his consciousness—of his soul—and fitting them back together. He found a laser-sharp focus that was completely out of place here in this fuzzy, unfocused world, and forced himself to hold back the curse-memories and think of a way to get him and Gray out of here. Gray—who seemed to have slipped back into his pseudo-nonexistence while Natsu went through his crisis of existence—stirred in response to Natsu's renewed activity.

_'Let me go.'_

_"No. Why would I do that?"_

Gray's weary plea only served to fuel Natsu's determination. It confirmed that the dragon slayer's continued awareness of reality was the only thing keeping Gray out of his vegetative state.

_'Because this is wrong. I don't exist. Nothing exists. This place doesn't exist. I belong here.'_

_"If nothing exists, then what am I?"_

_'…I don't know. I don't think you belong here.'_

_"Neither do you."_

_'I do. Let me go.'_

_"If I exist then that means that there's still an outside world where things exist—so it can't be that nothing exists. It isn't hopeless. We couldn't even be having this conversation right now if you didn't exist."_

Gray didn't respond, but Natsu could feel his muted disagreement. It seemed like everything Gray felt and thought was dulled and mostly emotionless. It was all washed out, like a hollow facsimile of reality. Natsu waited to see if Gray would communicate anything else, but instead he felt that floating, drifting sensation getting stronger again and the curse-memories began nibbling at the edges of his awareness once more. He cursed silently as he realized that Gray was trying to lose himself again. And if Gray lost himself, he'd take Natsu with him.

_"Gray!"_

There was no response.

_"Gray!"_

(What in the world was the voice blathering on about now?)

There was a slight prickle of muted irritation and bewilderment.

_'Blue.'_

_"What?"_

Gray didn't answer immediately, and Natsu considered the odd reply. What the hell was Gray playing at, just saying a random color like that? The dragon slayer paused. Actually, now that he thought about it, something about this was tugging at his memory. Or not his memory—Gray's memory. In Gray's last days, when he had started forgetting himself…

Natsu felt that almost-nauseous sensation again. Of course Gray wouldn't remember his name anymore. Just like he had forgotten it when the curse had been breaking him down before his 'death', he wouldn't remember it now.

The dragon slayer felt his feeling become amplified and realized that he had transmitted it to Gray, who was now feeling some semblance of it as well. He wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or not.

_"Gray is your name."_

_'I have no name.'_

_"Yes you do. From before."_

_'Before?'_

_"Yes. From before you came here."_

(There was no before. There was no after. There was no now. There was nothing.)

Natsu felt a faint sense of confusion and disagreement coming from Gray, but the sensations were still muted, as if Gray couldn't really bring himself to care overmuch and was just going through the motions. Natsu supposed he shouldn't be surprised, considering that all of Gray's current knowledge of emotions apparently came through the link.

_'There was no before.'_

_"Of course there was. You had a life before you got stuck here."_

_'No. It has always been nothing.'_

_"You're wrong. You can't remember it, but you had a life outside of here. Your name was Gray and you_ lived _. You had a life, you had magic, you had friends."_

_'You make no sense.'_

_"You can't remember, but I can. I knew you from before. I'm Natsu. I'm your friend. We grew up together and fought together and lived together. I remember. And I'm going to bring you back where you belong."_

_'I don't belong anywhere. I belong here.'_

(The paradox of nonexistence. The paradox of the void.)

_"No, you don't. Do you think I belong here?"_

There was another pause, and Natsu could feel Gray considering the question and answer. It gave him hope, because it meant that Gray was thinking in a way he hadn't been in a year and a half, and it was an indicator that maybe he could still be brought back.

_'No, I don't think so. But you could.'_

_"What do you mean?"_

_'If you stay here then you could belong. You're fading already, aren't you?'_

Natsu felt a prick of fear, because he knew that Gray was right. He could still feel the void nibbling away at the edges of his consciousness, threatening to erase him in the same way it had tried to erase Gray.

_"I don't want to fade."_

_'Then why are you here?'_

_"To bring you home."_

_'I have no home.'_

_"You do. You just don't remember it."_

_'Hm.'_

_"You know about the fading. Do you remember when you faded?"_

Once again, Natsu could feel Gray focus his awareness enough to think through the question.

_'Not really. I don't know if I faded. If I've been here forever, did I have to fade to get here? No, I know about the fading because I can feel how you're fading.'_

_"You haven't been here forever. You've only been here for a year and a half."_

_'Days, months, years, centuries, millennia…What do they matter? Time has no meaning here. There is no before, there is no after. There is no beginning, there is no end. There are no days or years. There is only now, and now is nothing.'_

_"Maybe time doesn't have any meaning here, but it still has meaning in the outside world."_

_'What outside world? There is nothing. And even if there_ was  _an outside world, what would it matter? It has no meaning here.'_

_"It matters because I'm going to take you back. You know those memories you keep experiencing? The ones of you dying? That's something that really happened to you. Well, when time rewound you actually came back to life instead of dying again, but the main part is pretty accurate."_

_'What do I care for life or death? What do I care for memories? They have no meaning here.'_

_"Does anything have any meaning here?"_

_'No.'_

(Existence is where everything has meaning. Nonexistence is when nothing does.)

Natsu considered that. It sounded pretty terrible, to be honest. What was the point of a world where nothing had any meaning?

(There was no point. That was why there was no meaning.)

_"That's sad. Before, you used to find meaning in everything."_

_'There was no before. A before would mean that there was a time when I existed.'_

_"Of course you existed. Didn't I tell you that those memories were yours? You know the blue-haired girl? The other two people who were screaming? They're real."_

_'Reality and non-reality have no meaning here. Those people have no meaning here.'_

_"Really? Because they cared about you a lot, and they still do. They're waiting for you to come home."_

_'Why? I don't know them. They have no meaning.'_

And that, Natsu thought, was the crux of the problem. He had gotten so caught up in debating Gray that he had started to forget the plan he had come here with. Even before he had arrived, he and the rest of Fairy Tail had deduced that Gray had forgotten everything important. They could, after all, tell from the curse-memories that Gray had been losing his memories and sense of self as he 'died'. Now that Natsu was here, he could tell that the problem was perhaps even more severe than they had though. Not only did Gray not remember anything, but he also felt not even the slightest flicker of recognition and nothing Natsu said was making him remember. And even worse, Gray didn't care enough to even try to remember.

(There was nothing to remember.)

That was bad enough, but Natsu had identified an even bigger problem. There was no way Gray could remember anything unless he cared enough to try, and he couldn't care enough to try because he felt as if nothing had any meaning. In a world with no meaning, how could Natsu possibly remind Gray of what was important? Gray didn't think that anything was important.

_"You cared so damn much."_

_'I'm sorry.'_

_"Are you? Really?"_

_'…No, probably not.'_

(How could he be?)

That hurt, but Natsu couldn't say that he was surprised. The only emotions he had felt coming from Gray this whole time were muted and washed out, and he suspected that they were only faded reflections of his own emotions coming through the link. Gray wouldn't be able to really understand emotions anymore.

But he  _could_ feel them. He could feel them if Natsu felt them. If Natsu could remember what was important to him and what had been important to Gray—if he could  _feel_ it—then Gray would be able to pick up on it. And those things, Natsu decided, must be the essence of existence. The knowledge and feelings of what was important, of how to care, of what it meant to really live, were perhaps the most basic elements of existence. If he could show that to Gray, then maybe he could pull his friend out of this terrible, empty place.

After all, Natsu didn't understand nonexistence and Gray didn't understand existence, so they were at something of a stalemate, which was why they were in this strange in-between state where they couldn't quite exist but couldn't quite fade away either. Since their senses were bound together, their fates were linked as well. Either they would both return to existence or they would both fade into nothingness. Right now Natsu was trying to get back to the real world and Gray was trying to disappear. This, then, was their stalemate, and it hinged on their understanding or lack thereof.

When Natsu had started to 'drift', as he called it, he had started fading into nonexistence because he had begun the process of understanding nonexistence. As soon as he could fully understand this hollow emptiness, both he and Gray would be lost to the void. But if he could make Gray understand existence then they could perhaps be saved instead. Memento Mori had worked by stealing Gray's understanding of existence and leaving him with only knowledge of this strange almost-nonexistence it had created for him. The curse hinged on memory and understanding. If Natsu could make it so that Gray no longer understood or remembered this nothingness, then this place could no longer exist and they should be released back into the outside world. Or that was the theory, anyway.

This was a game with the highest stakes, and Natsu had every intention of winning it. Under normal circumstances he and Gray would be pretty evenly matched, but Natsu thought he might have the advantage here. Which was just as well, because he hated to lose.

_"I'm going to make you remember."_

_'You can't.'_

But failure wasn't an option. Natsu focused as hard as he could, pulling himself away from the brink of the abyss. He could feel Gray take a faint interest in his actions, but he wasn't interested in speaking to his friend anymore right now. Talking wasn't working, so instead he started concentrating on what it felt like to be alive.

Natsu thought about Fairy Tail and how much all of the guild members meant to each other. He thought about the thrill of the fight, the exhilaration at taking down the enemy, and the celebration of the victory. He thought about the beauty of the magic and the friendship, the joy of laughter and happiness with friends and family, the feeling of just waking up and knowing that he was alive and ready to face another day of adventure.

(Meaningless.)

_'What are you doing?'_

Natsu ignored Gray's politely disinterested query. Internally, he was starting to panic a little. This didn't seem to be working. He was thinking about all the things that were important to him and feeling how much meaning and life they had, but Gray didn't seem affected at all. What was he doing wrong? What more did he need to do? Natsu fought down that worm of fear. He needed Gray to remember and feel all the good things, and he didn't want his fear and frustration ruining that.

He felt a particularly strong jolt of panic and hopelessness and tried to dismiss it as he continued struggling to push all of his positive emotions through the link. It was as he was trying to mask his negativity that he felt Gray beginning to show some interest.

_'What is that?'_

The unexpected question and sudden interest shocked Natsu into temporarily losing his concentration on his litany of all things good and meaningful. Gray had shown little interest when Natsu was trying to show him all the good things, so why was he so interested now? In fact, this was the most intense spike of interest he had felt from Gray the entire time he had been here. What was it that Gray found so interesting? What was it that he needed to understand?

That little white flower from Gray's grave suddenly popped into Natsu's mind for no apparent reason. The dragon slayer considered it for a moment before coming to a realization. He thought about how much that flower had reminded him of Gray, of how he had watched it die and the feeling of hopeless loss that accompanied its demise, of how even though the entire experience had been heartbreaking it had eventually brought him hope again as well. He thought about the finality of its death and of how he had left the second flower to live on in the valley when he had gone back once more. It reminded him of how everyone had been so devastated by Gray's 'death' and of all the tears they had shed. Natsu could still clearly feel how shocked and heartbroken and terribly guilty he had felt when he had come back from his training trip only to be told that Gray was gone.

Gray's presence seemed to shift and focus. He was intensely interested now, and Natsu could feel bewildered agitation coming off him in waves.

_'Stop. It's too much. What are you doing? It's too much.'_

(There should be nothing, but now there were feelings and they  _hurt_. Some of them felt good, but some of them hurt so much. And they were all so damn  _real_.)

Natsu wanted to smile. He would have smiled if he still had a body. A rush of excitement coursed through him as he realized that he had figured out the problem. Memento Mori had taken all the good things from Gray, but it had taken the bad too. It had blurred the lines between life and death, reality and non-reality, existence and nonexistence. None of those concepts had any true meaning unless you considered its counterpart. What was life, really, unless there was death? If there was nothing that didn't exist, then what meaning did existence really have?

Yes, Gray needed to feel all of the good things, the real things. He needed to understand how it felt to exist and to be alive. But he also needed to know of death and sorrow and guilt and all of the other things he would have experienced in his life. As much as Natsu only wanted to show his friend the happiness and fun experiences, existence wasn't only about the good times. Gray needed to remember it all, good  _and_ bad.

_'Stop. I don't understand, I don't understand. Stop.'_

(It didn't make any sense. None of this could be real. It didn't mean anything. It didn't—)

Natsu kept pushing. He thought he could feel an echo of his emotions coming back at him from Gray's side of the link. He wasn't quite sure whether or not Gray was actually remembering how to feel or if it was just leftover emotions from what Natsu was feeding through the bond, but it was something. He felt like they were almost there. Almost—

There was only one thing left he could think of. He thought about how badly everyone wanted to rescue Gray. He made himself feel all the desperation and grief and longing and hope that attacked him when he thought about how much he missed Gray and wanted him back. It was a strange mixture of emotion. There was the terrible sadness and guilt, but also the fierce determination and burning hope. But the one thing all the emotional components had in common was that they were all extremely intense. Because right now, getting Gray back was what Natsu wanted most in the world.

At that moment, Natsu felt an intense spike of emotion sear through the link and everything seemed to disappear.

* * *

When Natsu came to, he was very disoriented. There were flashes of color and loud talking and a solidness that hadn't existed in the void. He blinked to clear his vision and peered around blearily.

"Oh thank goodness!" Lucy cried, tears streaming down her face as she lunged forward and hugged him. "We thought we lost you!"

Natsu tried to reassure her that he was fine, but he couldn't seem to make his mouth work. He finally managed to force it open, but then it opened and closed soundlessly a few times as he tried to remember how to form words. His first attempt at speech was somewhat garbled and only succeeded in alarming everyone more, but after a second his normal sensations started coming back.

"I'm fine, Luce. What are you panicking for?"

He began carefully moving his limbs about. They felt rather foreign and heavy since he wasn't used to using them anymore. In fact, his entire body felt slightly alien to him after his experience in the other world, but the wrongness faded after several long seconds and he pulled himself to his feet unsteadily. Apparently he had ended up on the floor at some point.

Patting Lucy awkwardly on the back, Natsu glanced about the room. All of Fairy Tail was gathered around him, and everyone had intensely relieved expressions as they saw him up and moving.

"What happened?" he asked in confusion as Lucy finally pulled away and rubbed at her wet eyes. She wasn't the only one who was crying, so something must have happened.

He looked over at Meredy and frowned. She looked terrible. Her whole body was trembling and she was sobbing quietly as Jellal and Juvia closed ranks about her and tried to soothe her.

"Are you okay?"

She looked up at him with watery eyes. "I thought you weren't going to come back!" she wailed, her voice breaking. "I put the link on you and then you suddenly collapsed. You wouldn't respond to anything, and then you stopped breathing. And you were just lying there looking so dead and we couldn't wake you up. And I thought—I thought—"

She broke off as her tears intensified. She buried her face in her hands and Juvia hugged her tightly. Natsu blinked at her uncomprehendingly for a moment. Well, that explained why he had been on the floor at least. Really, he should have expected this. The sense of nonexistence coming through the link from Gray had been so strong and absolute that Natsu had lost himself to it entirely, in a way. Of course his body in the real world wouldn't have been functioning properly.

"Hey, it's okay," he reassured her. "I'm fine. And it's not your fault—I asked you to do this and I knew the risks."

Although he had to admit that he could understand why she was so upset. She must have been afraid that she had doomed him to a similar fate as Gray's.

Gray.

Natsu's head jerked up and he looked around wildly. "Gray!" he muttered frantically.

"I'm so sorry, Natsu," Erza said quietly, stepping up beside him to rest a restraining hand on his arm. "When you collapsed we panicked and tried to wake you up. It didn't work at first, but Meredy managed to revive you eventually and break the sensory link. I'm sorry, but we felt that we had to pull you back before we lost you too."

Natsu stared at her blankly, unwilling to believe her. He had been so close— _so close_ —to getting Gray back. He had thought that when he ended up back here again, it was because he had finally made it through to Gray so they had both woken up. That his friends had been the ones to wake him up—that he was the only one who had made it back—was something he wasn't able to accept.

"No!" he protested desperately. He shook off Erza and backed away, watching everyone with wild eyes. "No."

Then he turned and ran, ignoring everyone's cries and pleas for him to wait. He ran straight to the backroom and flung open the door, not caring about illusions or curse-memories or any of that. He stumbled across the room, over to the table Gray's body was lying on, and slammed his hands down on either side of his friend's unresponsive form. Looking down at Gray's still face, Natsu stared at his friend and willed him to move.

"Wake up, Gray!"

He was vaguely aware that the rest of Fairy Tail had crowded in behind him and that his friends were tearfully trying to coax him into coming back, but he ignored them. He was about to call out to Gray again when he suddenly realized that there were no curse-memories assaulting him and no illusion of a decayed corpse laid overtop of his friend's body.

And it was at that moment that Gray opened his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you might have figured out where this is going by now. I honestly don't usually like amnesia fics, but I couldn't think of a way to get around that here. The whole point of Memento Mori was to take away Gray's memories and erase him, so it would be a total cop-out to make him come back and everything magically be okay. But saying that Gray has amnesia is a gross oversimplification. The curse erased not only his memories, but his entire sense of self. You might be able to tell that Gray has limited knowledge of the outside world, little understanding of emotions, and almost zero sense of self. This "state of nonexistence" he's in was incomplete (blah blah, devil slayer magic providing partial immunity, blah), so it's not like everything is gone. If everything was gone, Gray would basically be a vegetable, and I have no idea how to write that. I suspect that it would be just as boring to read as to write.


	8. Ch 7-An old friend returns

* * *

**Chapter 7**

_(In which an old friend returns but might be more of a new friend.)_

* * *

For a second, Natsu couldn't breathe. He just stared down at Gray wordlessly, searching those dark eyes for any flicker of recognition. There was none. His friend's eyes were empty and blank, but they were open, which was more than Natsu had ever thought he'd see again.

"Gray?" he asked hesitantly.

Sensing the shift in the atmosphere, everyone hovering in the doorway quieted.

"Why aren't we getting pulled into the memories?" someone whispered into the stillness.

"I don't know."

"Oh my gosh, his eyes are open!"

Behind him everyone began pouring into the room as they realized that something was happening to Gray. Natsu ignored them in favor of studying his friend, desperately searching for any kind of response.

"Do you remember me?" he questioned, fighting back the edge of desperation in his voice.

Those blank, uncomprehending eyes slowly fixed on Natsu's face, but Gray didn't say anything. Natsu was about to panic before he remembered how he had been unable to speak properly for a few seconds when he had first woken up. He didn't know how much worse it would be for Gray.

"What's wrong with him?" Lucy asked fearfully as she edged up beside Natsu to peer down at the ice mage.

Gray's eyes slid over to study her briefly, but there was no recognition there. After a second, he returned his gaze to Natsu.

"He looked at me," Lucy breathed. "But why isn't he saying anything?"

Natsu shrugged. "I had a hard time remembering how to talk for a few seconds when I first woke up. Let's give him a few minutes to get his bearings." He grimaced faintly. "After all, he's been stuck in the void for a year and a half now. It might take him a little while to recover."

"Gray-sama?" Juvia asked disbelievingly as she inched forward and looked down at Gray with wide eyes. She finally tore her gaze away to look at Natsu. "Natsu-san brought him back?"

Natsu nodded and finally forced himself to look at the others instead of staring at Gray. Everyone looked torn between excitement, shock, and fear, which was pretty much how Natsu felt too. There was the excitement that Gray was back and wasn't dead, the shock that they had actually managed to pull this off, and the fear that something wasn't quite right with Gray. It was a bittersweet reunion, and there was a lingering feeling pervading the air that things weren't exactly fixed—that they had just jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.

"Tell us what happened," Erza demanded, her eyes blazing with a mixture of curiosity and hope that was still warring with the initial shock and disbelief at this turn of events.

Natsu obliged and tried to explain the void as best he could. It wasn't easy and he didn't do a very good job because there were things about nonexistence that just defied words and easy explanations. He briefly wondered if this was how Minerva had felt when she had tried explaining her magic to them.

He had almost given up on his explanation when his keen ears picked up a slight sound from behind him. Spinning quickly on his heel, he found that Gray's slack expression had been replaced by a slight frown and that the ice mage seemed to be cautiously testing his muscles with jerky, uncoordinated movements.

"Gray!"

Gray met Natsu's gaze again, his eyes unreadable.

"Do you remember me?" Natsu repeated.

For a moment Gray said nothing, and Natsu began to think that he still hadn't recovered enough to speak. But then Gray's mouth opened and closed slowly a few times as the ice mage carefully tested its mechanics.

"You're the voice," Gray said slowly, his words slightly mangled as his mouth moved in unconventional ways. His voice was perfectly neutral and emotionless.

Natsu felt his heart sink like a stone. It was true that he had expected this when Gray didn't show any sign of recognition upon waking, but that didn't make it any less tragic. Some part of him had still been hoping that Gray would remember something. Natsu had done so much to get Gray back, and it hurt to know that it still wasn't enough.

"Yeah," Natsu said after a moment, his voice wavering slightly. "The voice."

Natsu stumbled to the side as Juvia suddenly pushed her way past him.

"Gray-sama! Juvia missed Gray-sama so much!"

She threw her arms around the ice mage but he flinched back, his movements still uncoordinated. Withdrawing a little, Juvia blinked at him in confusion. He stared back at her impassively.

"Gray-sama?" she asked, her voice bewildered and a little hurt.

"He doesn't remember anything, Juvia," Natsu said quietly.

Juvia turned to look at him, her eyes widening almost comically as they filled with tears. Then she returned her gaze to Gray.

"Gray-sama doesn't remember Juvia?" she asked, her voice thick with tears and pain.

Gray didn't say anything for a moment, but instead studied her with an almost curious expression.

"You're the blue-haired girl," he said finally. His voice was still strangely monotonous, but it also held the faintest trace of surprise. "The one who was screaming."

Juvia recoiled and stared at him in puzzled confusion. "What?"

Gray's gaze slid away from her face and focused on Natsu again. "I guess you were right after all," he murmured, his words still slightly slurred.

"About what?" Natsu asked. "That they were real people?"

"Mhm."

"Natsu. Explain what's going on please," Erza interrupted. "If he doesn't…If he doesn't remember anything, why does he kind of remember Juvia?"

Natsu sighed and ran a hand through his hair as he considered how best to explain it. "Well…I know I said that he was in a state of nonexistence, but it was kind of an incomplete one. There was a whole lot of nothingness, but I think he was also semi-aware of those damn curse-memories. Not the ones we saw of his 'death' from Memento Mori, but the ones that the curse kept showing him of his earlier death. They were playing in a loop there. I guess the curse really couldn't let him go." Natsu bit his lip and looked at Juvia. "So when he says you're the blue-haired girl who was screaming, he means that he's…somehow been aware of you before, from the time when the dragonlings killed him. That's the closest thing he has to a memory right now."

There was a heavy silence as everyone digested that. Natsu's gaze drifted back to Gray and he almost wished his friend would speak, even if he wasn't exactly the same anymore. Gray had been too damn quiet, and judging by the flat, uninterested look in his eyes, he didn't feel the need to say much of anything. Apparently that emotional dullness had followed him back from the void, but Natsu had every intention of making him care again.

"If he doesn't remember anything then how did you get him back?" Erza asked finally.

Natsu scowled in frustration and shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. I was pushing a lot of my emotions through the link and it felt like he was starting to feel something in response. I thought that if he was remembering how to feel enough that he could make it back with me, then maybe it had affected him enough that he would remember more when he woke up. I hoped…I…"

He trailed off and shrugged again, his gaze sliding away from the others so that they couldn't see the bitter disappointment and sadness in his eyes.

"Oh," Meredy said in a small voice.

Something in her voice forced Natsu to look at her. The pink-haired girl was standing in the doorway next to Jellal, a stricken expression on her face.

"When I broke the sensory link…Oh my God, I might have screwed it up. If I broke the link too soon then maybe whatever progress you made was undone." Her eyes filled with tears. "I'm sorry!" she wailed, her voice rising in pitch as she buried her face in her hands.

Natsu opened his mouth to comfort her, but a sudden movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. Twisting around, he saw that Gray had finally succeeded in sitting upright, although he still didn't look very steady. The ice mage was staring at Meredy with slightly narrowed eyes.

"Gray?" Natsu asked hesitantly, not sure what had caught the other man's attention. Everyone looked over to see why Natsu was questioning Gray.

"You were screaming too," Gray said slowly, dragging the words out slowly as if he was testing each one as he spoke it.

Meredy peered at him from between her fingers and then let her hands drop away from her face as she stared at him with a mixture of confusion and hope.

"Huh? What do you—?" She paused and a sudden flash of understanding crossed her face. "Oh. Yes, I was there too, with Juvia."

Natsu nodded thoughtfully. He did vaguely remember hearing someone mention that Meredy had been the other person around when Gray was shot by the dragonlings, aside from Juvia and Lyon. The sound of her voice and the way she had almost started wailing by the end of her speech must have triggered some recognition in Gray. Natsu couldn't say that he would have been so easily able to identify the scream in the memory from just a handful of words and a few seconds of speech, but he supposed that Gray had been reliving the curse-memories for far longer than he had.

Suspicion confirmed, Gray seemed to start losing interest again. "It's not your fault," he said absently. "I never remembered anything. I never felt anything."

Natsu scowled at him. "But I could feel your emotions coming through the link!" he protested.

Gray's flat gaze came to rest on the dragon slayer, and Natsu shifted uncomfortably. That dead stare was disconcerting, especially since it was set in such a familiar face. Gray's eyes shouldn't look like that.

"No," the ice mage disagreed. "You felt your own emotions reflecting back across the link. I never felt anything myself. You felt everything for me, and it must have been just enough to bring me…here."

Gray glanced about with a suddenly lost expression. Something in his face made Natsu concerned about how he was handling things.

"How are you feeling?" the dragon slayer asked.

"Heavy," Gray said slowly, after considering the question for a moment.

The strangeness of the response almost made Natsu want to laugh, but he understood the feeling. He had felt much the same when he had been catapulted back into his body after floating in the void.

"Yeah, it'll feel weird for a while. If you just keep practicing how to move your body then it should get better."

Natsu blinked in surprise as his inquiry into Gray's welfare seemed to suddenly open the floodgates. Everyone else crowded around Gray and began talking at once, asking him about his time in the void and what he remembered and how he was doing. Although the blank look didn't fade from Gray's face, his eyes widened slightly and he inched backwards away from them. Unfortunately he was still unsteady and unused to having a body, so his muscles suddenly gave out and he pitched backwards. Natsu's arms shot out and pulled Gray back upright before his head hit the table.

"Back up, back up. Give him some space," Natsu barked.

Looking suitably chastened, everyone took a few steps back, even Juvia. Satisfied that Gray could hold himself upright again, Natsu released him and then peered at him worriedly.

"Are you okay? What's going on?" he asked quietly.

Gray's eyes darted around the room, briefly touching on every person standing there before locking on Natsu's face again. The ice mage's previous disinterest had been replaced by a pinched expression, and his face was drawn and pale.

"It's loud," he said finally.

Natsu blinked at him. Sure, everyone had been talking at once, but they hadn't been overly loud. They did have some restraint, after all. But Natsu supposed that after what felt like an eternity not-existing in a place where there was nothing, even the quietest things would seem loud.

"What—?"

"Everything," Gray interrupted, not waiting to hear Natsu's question. He glanced about the room again and seemed to withdraw into himself. "All the noise, all the colors, all the movements, all the people, all the things that shouldn't exist…They're all so loud."

Understanding flickered in Natsu's eyes.

"He's getting overwhelmed, guys," he said, turning back to the others. "Overwhelmed and overstimulated. Remember, he didn't even know any of this existed until a few minutes ago, and he still doesn't know how to handle it. Why don't we all go wait outside and talk for a bit, and give him a chance to calm down and acclimate? I think he could probably use a few minutes alone."

There were a few reluctant nods.

"Are you sure?" Erza asked uncertainly, still watching Gray. "Is it really a good idea to leave him alone right now?"

Natsu shrugged. "It would only be for a few minutes." He looked back over at Gray. "What do you say?" he asked the ice mage. "Do you want us to leave you alone for a couple minutes?"

Gray's expression was faintly bewildered, and Natsu thought over what he had just said in order to determine what it was that had puzzled his friend. He thought it might be the concept of time. After all, time didn't have any meaning in a world where nothing existed and nothing ever happened.

"It would just be for a short time." Gray's expression didn't change, so Natsu tried again. "It means that you'll be on your own for a while, but then we'll come back. Soon."

He wasn't sure that 'soon' was a concept Gray really understood at this point, but he tacked it onto the end anyway. In any case, Gray seemed to comprehend something at least, and he nodded slowly.

"Okay."

Natsu tried to smile at him, but he thought it probably came out strained due to all the tension and disappointment he was feeling, mixed with the exhilaration of actually succeeding in retrieving Gray. He quickly ushered everyone out of the room, shut the door behind them, and turned to face them. They were all gathered about in a loose semicircle, and something in their expressions reminded him of the determination they had had when they met to discuss how to get Gray back after Natsu had carried his body into the guild hall. The disappointment and anxiety was still there, but as the shock started to wear off, some of the determination seemed to be seeping back in. Natsu sensed that it was time for another intense planning session.

Erza opened her mouth to take charge again, but surprisingly it was Bickslow who beat her to the punch.

"I've never seen anything like it," he muttered, staring at the closed door with narrowed eyes.

Natsu felt a sudden prick of fear at that. He hadn't noticed that Bickslow had been watching Gray like that, and he wasn't sure he wanted to know what the other mage had seen in Gray's soul.

"How bad is it?" Erza asked quietly.

Bickslow shook his head and grimaced. "I don't know, but I did warn you that there would likely be damage."

"Yes," Natsu interrupted impatiently, not caring for Bickslow's stalling. "Tell us what's going on with him."

Irritation flashed across the other mage's face for a brief moment, but then it vanished and he just looked tired and worried.

"His soul, it's…faded."

"Faded?" Lucy asked, her voice even higher-pitched than usual. "What do you mean?"

"I mean…" Bickslow let out a breath and shrugged helplessly. "I was expecting that maybe some chunks of it would be torn off or something. I've seen that happen before, when something is tearing at a soul. And Gray  _does_ have some damage like that. It looks like the very edges of his soul were eaten away, but honestly, that damage isn't as extensive as I would have expected.

"No, the problem is that his soul is barely there at all. I don't even know how else to describe it other than that it's faded. It's like it just started fading away, disappearing the longer he was gone. I mean, if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. He was forgetting everything and losing everything, so why not lose his soul too? My guess is that the longer he was in that pocket of nonexistence—the more he forgot and the longer he assimilated into the void—the more his soul faded. If we had waited too much longer then it might have disappeared altogether, and that would have been the end of things."

Everyone stared at him silently as they digested that. Natsu noticed that more than one person had a stricken expression, and he didn't doubt that he had a similar look plastered on his face. He honestly felt sickened. Just thinking about how close they had come to losing Gray forever was frightening, but it also went further than that. Everyone's first reaction on realizing that they had succeeded in rescuing Gray was relief and exhilaration, but seeing the state their friend had been brought to…It was heartbreaking. Natsu wasn't quite sure just what he had managed to bring back from the void.

"Can we fix it?" Erza asked finally.

Bickslow stared at her expressionlessly and shrugged. "I have no idea," he said flatly. "We don't even know what relationship this damage has to what happened to him. It might be that his soul was damaged which is what caused him to lose himself in the first place, or it might be that the curse forced him to forget everything and lose himself and that process is what damaged his soul. Honestly, it's probably a mixture of both.

"Theoretically, if we could find a way to make him remember the things he's forgotten and learn how to live and exist again, then maybe— _maybe_ —we could reverse some of the damage. But this is all conjecture, really. I've never seen anything like this before, so I don't know what we can really do for him."

His doubtful tone wasn't lost on them. No one looked overly optimistic at the lackluster suggestion. They still looked downright devastated. Natsu couldn't blame them because he felt much the same way, but they needed to work past that right now because wallowing in self-pity wasn't going to help Gray. This whole journey had begun with one crazy, half-formed idea, and Natsu hadn't even had any real proof of his theories until he had dug up Gray's body. Even then they hadn't been sure that there was a way to save the ice mage. They had been facing impossible odds right from the beginning, but Natsu had  _done it_. He had managed to find Gray in the void and drag his friend back to reality, because Fairy Tail didn't know the meaning of 'impossible'. They had already come so far, fought so hard, endured so much, that there was no way they could lose hope and give up now.

"We're going to have to try," Natsu said in a low voice. "I worked hard to get him back, and I'm not giving up on him so easily. It's pretty damn amazing that we managed to rescue him in the first place, because we all knew it was a long shot. But you know what? We did it. We sat down and came up with plans, and when our first plans didn't work out, we just focused our efforts on other schemes until we found something that worked. We didn't give up then even when it seemed impossible, and we're sure as hell not going to give up now. I said that I'd get Gray back and I meant it. I want  _all_ of him back, and I'm going to keep fighting until that happens."

He pushed aside all of that hopelessness and grief that had overtaken him when he had first realized that he had only managed to bring back an empty shell of Gray. He didn't have time for that terrible shattered feeling right now—there was work to be done. His eyes glowed with fierce determination as he stared down the others.

"You're right, of course," Erza agreed. Natsu was relieved to see her shake off her shock and narrow her eyes in sudden resolve. "If we work together then I'm sure we can come up with a way to get our friend back. We knew we didn't have much of a chance when we came up with those plans to rescue Gray, but we didn't let that stop us. And look where we are now. Gray isn't the same, but it's a start. So what if it seems like an impossible task now? We thought it was impossible before, but we still pulled it off. So. Let's start brainstorming."

There were a few sharp nods as everyone tried to set aside their grief and started thinking about how to best tackle this newest setback. Now that the initial shock and despair was wearing off, Natsu could see that they hadn't lost their determination after all. He was grateful for that, because there was no way he could bring Gray back alone.

"What about Rufus?" Sting asked. "You wanted him to come down here in the first place because you thought he might be able to bring back some of Gray's memories if you could find him. Well, you've found him now, so it must be worth a shot, right? I can send word to Sabertooth and ask him to come back down."

Natsu nodded. "We would appreciate that. And I think it would definitely be a good idea to let him and Minerva know that we managed to find Gray after all."

He could still remember the look on Minerva's face when she had finally had to give up the search. She really had seemed to feel terrible about it.

Sting blinked at him for a moment before nodding in silent understanding. "Well yes, we would have to tell them the good news anyway."

"If I can help…" Meredy added in a small voice. The poor girl still looked like an emotional mess after the scare she had earlier, but she was still determined to do what she could.

Natsu nodded encouragingly. "Your sensory link is what let me bring him back in the first place," he commented, smiling over at her. "And I think that maybe if we work with it, we can eventually get him to start feeling things on his own again. If nothing else, maybe it will at least help him remember what things feel like."

Meredy gave him a shaky smile. Even though she still looked terrified, she seemed to feel a little better at the reminder that her powers had ultimately saved Gray.

"I think that a lot of it might just be a matter of time though," Erza remarked thoughtfully. "It's like how he couldn't even speak or move at first, but started regaining some of that after a few minutes. We're going to have to work with him on that too, I think. It might take a while to get him back up to a normal level of motor functioning.

"But I think that the memories might have a problem like that too. Maybe he'll eventually start regaining some of them on his own if we keep reminding him of things. Although with how much damage the curse did…we'll probably need alternative ways to really break through to him."

"Yeah." Lucy latched on to that idea. "You said that pretty much nothing existed where Gray was, right? Well now he's surrounded by everything important. Just being around it all might help him start remembering things."

"I guess it would be helpful to figure out what he still remembers first," Rogue remarked, speaking up for the first time.

They all looked over at him. Natsu arched an eyebrow, uncertain of where Rogue was going with this. The shadow dragon slayer rarely said anything unless it was important, so Natsu was keen to understand what he was thinking.

"Not a whole lot of anything," Gajeel grumbled.

Rogue's expression didn't change, but something flickered in his eyes as he stared down his idol.

"What do you mean?" Natsu asked hurriedly, frowning over at Gajeel.

For a moment Rogue said nothing, but then his crimson gaze slid back over to Natsu.

"I mean that although we all assume that he doesn't remember anything, he obviously still knows some things," he explained evenly. "You thought he wouldn't know anything because of the whole nonexistence thing, but you also admit that whatever state of nonexistence he was in was incomplete at best, because the curse couldn't fully erase him due to the interference of his devil slaying magic. You say that he didn't know or remember anything when you talked to him in the void, but he must have retained a basic understanding of some things in order to communicate with you.

"Despite the fact that he seems to know nothing of this world, he can still speak, and he can speak coherently. Think about that. Just conversing with us requires that he have some knowledge of the words he uses and an understanding of the words we use to communicate with him. If he really remembered nothing, then why can he still talk almost normally? He shouldn't be able to comprehend what we're saying, but he can. That requires him to be able to grasp at least some of the concepts we talked about.

"He obviously doesn't have explicit memories of anything from before the curse, but he still has some idea of some of the fundamentals of the real world, even if he's a little rusty. I don't know why. Maybe some of it is visceral knowledge that somehow remained in his body, or perhaps the curse didn't destroy him as completely as we thought, or maybe the context of the real world is helping him remember bits and pieces."

Natsu let out a breath and felt the corners of his lips twitch upwards. Rogue was right. Gray had been able to have an intelligent conversation with them, so even if he didn't understand everything, he still had enough instinctual knowledge left to communicate and comprehend things. The fact that he seemed to be regaining some of his knowledge was heartening because it suggested that there was hope that Gray could eventually be returned to normal, even if it took a while.

"Hm." Gajeel grunted and eyed Rogue up and down. "Good job, kid."

Rogue flushed slightly and looked away, and Natsu almost wanted to laugh.

"Well, at least that's a start," Cana declared. "We don't have to start from scratch."

"I bet that the longer he's around us, the more things he'll remember. And we'll start to get a better feel for how much he understands but doesn't think he knows," Lucy added.

"And then eventually Gray-sama will remember Juvia," the water mage said, her eyes filled with tears but also determination.

Bringing back Gray's memories seemed more and more likely by the minute, and everyone was starting to look a little more excited now that their task didn't seem quite so impossible. Natsu chose not to remark on the fact that just because it might not be impossible didn't mean that it would be easy. There were still a lot of questions about the extent of Gray's deficiencies and the likelihood of his recovery.

"We'll make him remember," Cana agreed, flashing a predatory smile.

"That's all well and good, but I think we'll have to be careful," Erza cautioned. "He's only been back for half an hour and he's already overwhelmed. That should lessen over time, but he's going to be in way over his head for a while. It might be better if we didn't try using Rufus or Meredy for a couple weeks. Pushing him too far too fast could end up making things worse. We should see how much progress he can make on his own first, and when he starts getting more comfortable with us and the world then we can try more intensive measures to bring his memory back."

"But Juvia wants Gray-sama back  _now_ ," Juvia protested.

There were a few other mutinous looks as well, but many people were nodding in reluctant agreement.

"I want him back as soon as possible too, Juvia," Natsu said quietly, "but Erza is right. This process won't be easy for him either, and he'll need some time to adjust. We can probably try jogging his memory in more subtle ways, but maybe we shouldn't pressure him too much just yet."

"I can ask Rufus to wait a week or two before he comes back down," Sting volunteered hesitantly.

Natsu nodded at him. "Thanks."

"In the meantime, maybe we should call Porlyusica-san," Wendy suggested, peering about the room nervously. "I don't know if she'll be able to do much for him, but she can at least check him out to make sure that nothing is wrong. After all, his body has been vacant for over a year and he had physical ailments before he…'died'. And she might have some suggestions for how to retrieve his memory."

"Can't you just check him over, Wendy?" Lucy asked curiously, her brown eyes slightly puzzled.

"I'd prefer a second opinion," Wendy answered. "And I don't think that this is something my magic can heal. Porlyusica-san's potions are versatile and she has a lot more experience with different conditions and problems. I think we should ask her opinion."

Erza nodded with a slight grimace. "We should really contact her anyway. She was pretty upset over losing Gray, and she deserves to know that we got him back. If she can help, then all the better."

There were some murmurs of agreement, although some people still looked disgruntled that they couldn't get to work on Gray's memory problem right away. Everyone was itching to get started.

"It'll be getting dark soon," Lisanna remarked. "Maybe it would be best to leave Gray alone for what's left of the day."

"We can't leave him  _alone-_ alone," Lucy protested. "He's going to have to stay with someone all the time."

"True," Cana agreed. "We'll need somewhere to put him."

"What about Gray-sama's apartment?"

Everyone looked over at Juvia incredulously.

"We thought he was dead for a year and a half," Laxus said dryly. "I don't think his apartment is still vacant."

But Juvia was already shaking her head in disagreement. "Lyon-san maintained it," she said quietly, her eyes sad. "Even though he was here when Gray-sama…Well, he couldn't really accept it. Lyon-san has been paying for Gray-sama's apartment this whole time, and all of Gray-sama's things are still there. It's like a…shrine. He still visits it every few months. Sometimes Juvia goes with him. Apparently the landlady liked Gray-sama a lot, so she agreed to let Lyon-san keep the apartment at a reduced price for as long as he wanted it, and she cleans it every few weeks. Gray-sama's apartment should be almost exactly as he left it."

Natsu's stomach twisted at that and he stared at Juvia in dismay. He had known that Lyon wouldn't have taken Gray's 'death' well, but this was something else. Even though Lyon had fully believed that Gray was dead, he had still paid for his apartment just so that Gray's home and belongings would still be around. There was something terribly tragic about that.

"Well shit," Cana said suddenly. "We're going to have to tell Lyon."

"Isn't that a good thing?" Mira asked. "He'll be glad to know that Gray's alive."

"Yes, but it will also be devastating when he realizes that Gray doesn't remember anything and isn't the same," Loke answered quietly. Natsu jumped a little at the celestial spirit's voice. Loke had been so quiet up to this point that Natsu hadn't even realized he was here. "It's like how excited we all were—and are—that we found Gray, but how we're still grieving because the Gray we got back isn't the one we remember. And it will be very bad for Lyon since they were so close."

Mira's eyes dimmed as she considered that. She sighed sadly. "Well, we still have to tell him. And I doubt he'll leave until Gray is back to normal again."

"I assume he has the keys to Gray's apartment?" Erza asked, steering everyone back to the problem at hand. "We'll send word to him tomorrow, and ask him to bring the keys as well. But for now, we need somewhere for Gray to stay tonight."

"Gray-sama can stay with Juvia!" Juvia offered.

"Uh, you live in the girls' dorm," Wendy pointed out.

They had needed to find more housing for the guild members who hadn't been in the city for a while and hadn't found new living arrangements yet, so the guild had managed to obtain a couple nearby buildings to turn into new and improved dormitories. The accommodations had gradually improved in the months since Fairy Tail reformed, as the mages turned the dorms and guild hall into more permanent structures. One thing that had  _not_  changed about Fairy Hills was that it was still females only.

Juvia deflated a little. "But—"

"He can stay with me," Natsu interrupted. "Honestly, it's probably the best option here. He knows me better than he knows the rest of you right now, because we were communicating back in the void. He only kind of recognizes Juvia and Meredy from the curse-memories, and he doesn't recognize the rest of you at all. I've had more interaction with him than you all, so he might feel more comfortable with me for now. We can discuss living arrangements again later when he starts settling in, but like we've said, it's probably a good idea to be careful about how we treat him when he's still so overwhelmed."

"You make a good argument," Erza conceded. Then her gaze sharpened as she stared him down. "But you had better actually take care of him properly. And don't lose him in your house. Your house is always messy enough to lose half the continent in."

Despite the truth in Erza's words, Natsu still managed to look offended. He gave her his best wounded look. "Hey, I cleaned up when Sting and Rogue came to stay with me. A little bit."

"Speaking of which," Rogue interrupted, "perhaps it would be better if Sting and I found another place to stay if you're bringing Gray home with you."

Natsu considered that. On one hand, it would be less overwhelming for Gray if Sting and Rogue left. On the other hand, Natsu felt bad about kicking out the other dragon slayers on such short notice, and he also wasn't sure if he might need help with Gray later. He didn't really know what he was getting himself into yet, didn't even know how compliant Gray would be, so it might be helpful to have a couple extra people around in case something went wrong.

"Well…Gray can stay in my room. If you two stick to the guestroom, it should be fine. It might be useful to have a few extra hands around in case anything happens, and he's going to have to get used to having people around. After all, there will be way more people when we bring him back to the guild tomorrow." He nodded slowly as he thought out loud. "Yeah, as long as you try not to be too obtrusive, you should be okay. Just don't be super loud and make sure to keep some space between you and him if he starts getting uncomfortable. Happy and I can take the couch. It should work fine for tonight, until we get Lyon down here."

Sting and Rogue exchanged uncertain glances.

"Are you sure that's a good idea, Natsu-san?" Sting asked.

Natsu shrugged. "Who knows? But if anything happens, I could use the extra help."

The twin dragon slayers nodded in agreement to that.

"Alright," Rogue agreed.

"Jellal and I will stick around for a bit too," Meredy added. "So if we want to try using my sensory link magic again later, we can."

Juvia smiled over at her and nodded.

"Okay then," Erza said briskly. "Gray will stay with Natsu and the others tonight. Tomorrow we'll contact Lyon and Porlyusica, and Sting can contact Minerva and Rufus. We can work out where to go from there once they show up. In the meantime, everyone can feel free to brainstorm any other ideas of how to bring back Gray's memories. Okay?"

"Okay," everyone chorused, looking more alive and determined now that they had some kind of plan, however vague and uncertain it might be.

"Right. I'm going to take Gray home now," Natsu said. He glanced at Sting and Rogue. "Are you coming?"

"Yes," Rogue replied. "Why don't Sting and I head over there right now so that we'll already be there when you get Gray over there?"

Natsu nodded his agreement. "Good idea. Take Happy with you."

Leaving the Sabertooth mages to get a head start and the other Fairy Tail mages to continue discussing this latest turn of events, Natsu headed for the backroom again. He opened the door and peered inside cautiously. Gray had obviously been practicing while the rest of Fairy Tail had been holding their war council, because he was pacing about the room unsteadily. A look of intense concentration was plastered on his face as he stared hard at his feet. His movements were still jerky and uncoordinated and he often stumbled to the side, but at least he was moving.

"Feeling any better?" Natsu asked.

Gray looked up in surprise. Losing his concentration, he lost his balance and stumbled into a table. Natsu hurried in the room to help him up again, but after the initial look of surprise, Gray went back to being remarkably unconcerned. He just shrugged. Natsu felt his heart sink a little at the lackluster response. It would take a while to get Gray back to normal.

"What do you say we go home?"

Gray nodded once, but Natsu didn't need to see the uncomprehending look in his eyes to know that he no longer felt like he had a home.


	9. Ch 8-Natsu hosts an awkward dinner party

**Chapter 8**

_(In which Natsu hosts a most awkward dinner party.)_

* * *

Getting Gray all the way back to the house was something of a challenge. The ice mage was still unsteady on his feet and sometimes his limbs would suddenly spasm or move in unintended ways. He almost toppled over on a number of occasions, and Natsu had to support him the whole time. It was slow going, and the dragon slayer hoped that Gray's motor skills and coordination would start coming back soon.

As they slowly made their way through the city, Natsu continued to surreptitiously test Gray. He would point out their favorite stores, buildings they had once destroyed, and even went so far as to take a circuitous route so that they could walk past the ice mage's old apartment. Gray listened to Natsu's rambling, occasionally shrugging or making a brief comment, but he recognized none of it and didn't appear at all interested. Natsu even took a wrong turn just to see if Gray might retain some implicit memory of the city and point out the blunder, but his friend didn't appear to notice.

As a result of Natsu's attempts to jog Gray's memory and the already slow speed of their journey, it was already dark by the time the pair reached the dragon slayer's house. Natsu had found the entire experience extremely disheartening and had lost some of his earlier optimism before he even walked in the door. Sting, Rogue, and Happy were already waiting inside, looking uncertain and anxious.

"You took a long time," Happy admonished, his eyes shining with relief as he hovered in the air and watched Gray and Natsu enter.

"Sorry, sorry. We were slow." Natsu noticed that Gray was watching Happy. He wasn't sure if his friend was necessarily interested in the Exceed, but he  _had_ chosen to focus his attention on the cat. Since Gray hadn't seemed to show much attentiveness to anything since he'd come back from the void, Natsu was eager to press the possible advantage. "I know, it's pretty strange, huh? It's not every day you see a blue flying cat who can talk," he told Gray cheerfully.

Gray turned that blank gaze back on Natsu. "Is it?" he asked tonelessly.

Natsu blinked at him. He had assumed that Gray was watching Happy because of the odd picture the little cat made. If Gray didn't remember Happy and the other Exceeds, then presumably they would be a strange sight for him since normal cats didn't fly or talk.

"You don't think it's strange?" the dragon slayer questioned him uncertainly.

Gray shrugged. "Not any more than the rest of you," he said flatly.

There was a brief pause as everyone stared at Gray with varying degrees of disbelief and confusion.

"Yeah, Fairy Tail mages  _are_ pretty strange," Sting offered with a nervous laugh, breaking the awkward silence. His eyes darted back and forth anxiously, as if he was uncertain of how he should respond.

Gray just stared blankly back and said nothing, completely unmoved. Natsu didn't share Sting's cautious optimism either. In fact, he felt his stomach sink as he considered Gray's statement.

"That's not what he means," he said quietly.

"Huh?" Sting peered at him worriedly, trying to figure out if he had just made a mistake.

Natsu tried to smile at the younger dragon slayer to reassure him, but the expression came out pinched and unhappy. " _Everything_ is strange to him right now, because he's not used to any of it. In his mind, none of this should even exist at all. Happy doesn't seem any stranger than the rest of us because we're  _all_ anomalies to him. And honestly, it probably means that his grasp of what is normal and what isn't is still skewed, because nothing is normal to him right now."

"Oh."

The others looked just about as discouraged as Natsu felt. They still had a lot of work to do to get Gray back to normal.

"Well, we made dinner while we were waiting for you," Rogue said finally, eager to change the subject.

"Great," Natsu said with a false cheeriness. He wanted the mood to lighten just as much as the Sabertooth mages did, and he didn't want to dwell too much on the disappointment and heartache that had accompanied the discovery of Gray's current mental state. "Please tell me you didn't let Happy convince you to make fish."

"Hey!"

Natsu laughed at Happy's protest and made his way to the kitchen, dragging a reluctant Gray with him. He maneuvered Gray into the room and helped him settle in one of the chairs at the table, stretching out his muscles and sighing in relief now that he didn't have to physically support the other mage any longer. Gray stared vacantly at the table and didn't seem to pay much attention to his surroundings.

"We did in fact make fish," Sting answered cheerfully, latching onto the lighter atmosphere with a fierce determination. "But we also made pasta as well."

"Great. Sounds good," Natsu commented as he rifled through the drawers to find silverware.

He ended up finding an odd assortment of mismatched forks because not only were his drawers dreadfully unorganized, but he also hadn't done dishes in nearly a week. The entire counter was covered in dirty dishes, and he resolved to clean up later now that other people were staying with him. He personally didn't mind living in a pig sty, but he had to admit that it was a different story when other people were stuck here too. Sting and Rogue had chosen not to comment on the mess so far and Natsu thought they were probably cutting him some slack since he'd been pretty messed up lately, but he would have to clean up his act eventually.

"Smells great too," Natsu added, sniffing at the food as Rogue started serving it out. He dropped a fork by everyone's plate and then settled into his own chair next to Gray. He watched the ice mage out of the corner of his eye as everyone finished whatever preparatory tasks they had been doing and sat down to eat.

Happy and the Sabertooth mages dug in immediately and started up a low-key conversation to relieve some of the tension. Gray, on the other hand, simply stared at the food with polite disinterest.

"Are you going to eat?" Natsu asked finally after watching Gray sit motionless for a few minutes.

The ice mage looked over at him. "Why?" he asked tonelessly.

The conversation around the table abruptly ceased as everyone turned their attention to this newest development. Natsu bit his lip as he considered how to explain such a basic necessity to Gray. He wasn't sure how much the ice mage knew. It was unfathomable to Natsu that Gray might not even understand the concept of eating anymore.

"You  _do_ know why eating is important, right?"

Gray shrugged. "More or less. But the sustenance that food provides is unnecessary when one has no corporeal form."

Natsu blinked at him for several long moments as he tried to decipher that mouthful of a statement. This Gray didn't talk like the old Gray, and he was much harder to understand. Everything he said was so expressionless and sometimes overly formal. Mix that with the uncertainty of what Gray actually understood and the fact that none of them could really understand Gray anymore, and things could quickly become incomprehensible.

"But you  _do_ have a body now," Rogue ventured. "So you're subject to the same physical constraints that we are. You may not have needed to eat when you were stuck in the void, but you have to eat now that you're back in reality. Your body can't survive too long without food."

"I suppose," Gray answered flatly, although he still didn't look like he particularly cared one way or the other.

They had all immediately decided that Gray should never be left alone for more than a few minutes, and this was the moment when Natsu realized how important and necessary that decision was. He highly doubted that Gray would look after himself properly unless someone else watched over him and made sure that he did so. Even if he felt hunger or thirst or pain, Natsu had the feeling that Gray would ignore the sensations simply because he didn't really care about his well-being. Gray still didn't believe that he should even exist, and he didn't seem to see the point in existing and living. Hopefully Fairy Tail could change that bleak outlook over time, but for now Gray would need constant supervision.

"Go ahead," Natsu urged him. "Pick up the fork and eat something."

The ice mage studied the fork blankly for a few seconds before he unenthusiastically attempted to pick it up. The problem was that if even his basic motor skills were impaired, so were his fine ones. Gray fumbled around awkwardly with the utensil for a few minutes. He would manage to lift it off the table, but then it would slip out of his fingers and fall back to the wooden surface with a clatter.

Natsu grimaced slightly, realizing that manipulating small objects was beyond his friend's capabilities at the moment. There were a lot of things he was willing to do for Gray, but spoon feeding him wasn't one of them. He winced and snatched the fork out of the air as it fell towards the table for what seemed like the hundredth time. The intermittent metallic clinking was grating on his sensitive dragon hearing, and judging by Sting and Rogue's pained expressions, Natsu thought that he wasn't the only one who was getting annoyed.

Gray didn't seem disturbed by Natsu's theft of the utensil. He simply settled back in his chair and watched the Fairy Tail dragon slayer unblinkingly with those dead eyes. His failure to properly wield the fork didn't seem to cause him any undue frustration or annoyance either, which was very unlike Gray. The Gray that Natsu remembered hated any kind of failure—no matter how small or trivial—but this new version didn't seem bothered at all.

"Okay, so maybe forks aren't a good idea for now," Natsu said conversationally, refusing to acknowledge his frustration and disappointment. "Why don't I just make you a sandwich? You can eat that with your hands and you won't have to struggle with a fork."

Gray shrugged, and Natsu found himself wishing that his friend would express any kind of opinion at all or give some kind of sign that he cared about  _something_.

"Unless you'd rather have the pasta and fish?" he asked hesitantly, prodding Gray to make a decision on his own.

"It doesn't matter," the ice mage said expressionlessly.

Natsu stared at him hopefully for a moment longer before sighing and standing up. "I'll just make you a sandwich then," he said quietly.

He dropped Gray's unused fork back into the silverware drawer and began gathering ingredients to make a sandwich. The others started speaking again to break the uncomfortable silence, and Natsu listened to them halfheartedly as he prepared Gray's food.

"If you aren't going to eat your fish then can I have it?" Happy asked Gray.

"Go for it," Gray answered. Natsu could practically hear the apathetic shrug in his voice.

"Thanks. I like fish."

"That's practically all he eats," Sting grumbled good-naturedly.

"Hey, at least my food of choice isn't kiwis, like Pantherlily. Kiwis. Can you imagine?" Happy asked disgustedly, his whiskers twitching in revulsion.

"Frosch used to eat a lot of flies," Rogue said mildly. "I think that's worse."

"Well, Frosch is also half-convinced that he's a frog," Happy reasoned.

"Sometimes  _I'm_ half-convinced that he's a frog," Sting added cheerfully.

"He is most definitely a cat," Rogue protested, sounding disgruntled.

"But remember the time he bought you that matching frog suit?" Sting teased.

Rogue groaned. "Don't remind me."

"But you were so  _cute_ in it!"

Finished making the sandwich, Natsu set it on a plate and turned back to the others just in time to see Rogue bury his face in his hands in embarrassment.

"You actually wore it?" Natsu asked as he made his way back to the table and set the sandwich in front of Gray.

"Don't remind me," Rogue repeated, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.

Natsu snickered, but turned his attention back to Gray. He could always tease Rogue later—and he most definitely would—but for now he was more concerned with his newly resurrected friend. Gray seemed content to stay out of the conversation, but Natsu noticed that he was at least paying attention to it, his dark eyes flitting back and forth as he followed the line of conversation. Natsu was relieved that he finally seemed at least semi-interested in something.

"Well here you go," he told Gray cheerfully. "Eat up. It's your favorite."

Gray looked suitably unimpressed by that assertion, but he dutifully picked up the sandwich. He dropped it once and had to reassemble it, but he seemed to get the hang of how to hold it pretty quickly. It was obviously easier for him to grasp the sandwich than it had been to manipulate a smaller object like the fork. After hesitating for a few seconds as he briefly considered how best to approach the novel situation, Gray awkwardly took a bite and set the sandwich back onto the plate. He chewed mechanically and swallowed.

Natsu watched him anxiously. "Do you like it?" he asked.

Gray glanced over at him and shrugged. "Not particularly."

"Do you  _dis_ like it?" Natsu pressed.

"Not particularly."

Natsu sighed and leaned back in his chair. "Would you prefer it if I made you something else instead?"

"Not really. This is adequate."

Natsu blinked over at him for a moment more, hoping for an elaboration, but when it became apparent that no further response was forthcoming, he turned his attention to his own plate and began pushing his pasta around unhappily with his fork.

"Well, keep eating it then," he mumbled.

There was awkward silence for a moment before Happy tried to lift the mood with some light teasing.

"I always told you that you were a bad cook, Natsu," the Exceed remarked, his voice buoyed by forced cheer. "I guess you'll have to improve so that he'll like your food. Maybe you could try out some new fish recipes."

Natsu chuckled obediently, but his heart wasn't in it. "Perhaps we should spare him the fish for a while."

"Admit it, despite all your complaining, you like fish too," Happy protested.

"Sure, but not half as much as you do," Natsu responded distractedly.

He hadn't realized how closely the others were watching him until Sting spoke up.

"Do you not like the pasta?"

"Huh?" Natsu looked up and blinked at the other dragon slayer.

"You've barely touched it," Rogue clarified.

Natsu looked back down at his plate. Given that he had mostly just been playing with his food for the past few minutes, it was still full. He hurriedly twirled his fork in the pasta and shoved a huge ball of noodles into his mouth.

"That's disgusting," Rogue grumbled as Natsu tried to chew the overwhelming amount of food with some difficulty.

Natsu finally managed to swallow it down with a big gulp and then snatched up Gray's uneaten plate of pasta so that he could fork some of it onto his plate.

"It's delicious," he said enthusiastically.

He attacked his food with a frenetic energy and began gulping it down in big bites. It  _was_ good, and he needed something to distract him from the whole Gray-not-being-Gray problem. So even though he didn't particularly feel like eating for once, he did so anyway, with an abundance of overenthusiasm.

"Are you really that upset that he didn't like your sandwich?" Rogue questioned cautiously.

Natsu looked up to see that Happy and the Sabertooth mages had stopped eating and were watching him with a mixture of worry and wariness. He blinked at them slowly, a little surprised that they had picked up on his mood so easily. Maybe they had realized that eating like a crazed maniac wasn't always his normal behavior. Well, actually he normally  _did_ eat like a crazed maniac, but not exactly like this.

He let out a breath and started pushing the pasta around his plate absently again. "No. If anything, I'm more upset that he didn't  _dis_ like it."

"Huh?" Sting asked, confusion coloring his voice. "Why?"

Natsu stared blankly at the noodles sliding around his plate.

"Gray always hated spicy mustard," he murmured mournfully. "And he never liked sardines like that, because 'who but Happy would want fish in a sandwich?'. Cheddar was never his favorite cheese either, and he always called me an idiot for putting peppers in my sandwiches."

There was a brief moment of silence as everyone processed that and put the pieces together.

"I thought you said that you made him his favorite?" Sting asked accusingly.

"I lied," Natsu muttered.

He glanced over at Gray. The ice mage was watching him expressionlessly. He had taken a few more unenthusiastic bites of the sandwich, but now it was lying abandoned on his plate as he studied Natsu.

"You shouldn't have brought me here," he said finally, his voice flat.

Natsu scowled slightly. "Well, sorry. I thought you'd be more comfortable here than with Lucy or one of the others."

Gray blinked at him and his expression didn't change. "That's not what I mean."

Natsu stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment before he realized the implications of the statement. His scowl deepened and he stabbed at his fish viciously with his fork.

"You really think I should have left you in the void? There's no way in hell," he growled.

The other dinner guests looked supremely uncomfortable as they looked back and forth between Natsu and Gray, but they didn't seem to have any idea of what to say in order to defuse the situation. The tense silence dragged on for a few long seconds before Gray spoke again.

"I'm not him," he said quietly.

Natsu tried to block out his voice, because he didn't want to hear that. This person might not be the Gray he remembered, but he could be again. And surely he must have some of Gray left in him. Natsu refused to believe that his friend was completely gone.

"Then who are you?" Sting asked cautiously.

They all stared at Gray as they waited anxiously for his response. Natsu narrowed his eyes at the ice mage. He was dying to hear just who Gray thought he was right now. For a moment his friend didn't move, but then the ice mage's lips curled into a dry half-smile that took Natsu's breath away. It was eerily reminiscent of some of Gray's old expressions, but at the same time it was also terribly alien.

"No one," Gray answered flatly. "I'm no one."

They gaped at him for a long moment, their expressions ranging from horrified to grief-stricken to sickened. Natsu's stomach sank and tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. He pushed them back angrily and stood up from the table abruptly, grabbing his plate and stalking across the kitchen to shove it into the fridge. He had lost his appetite.

"Natsu? Are you okay?" Happy asked hesitantly.

Natsu turned back to see that everyone had focused their attention on him again. He barked out a harsh laugh and crossed the floor in a few quick steps. Stopping in front of Gray, he slammed his hands down on the table and bent over to stare directly into those cold, dead eyes.

"I'm going to change your mind," he growled furiously.

Gray didn't say anything, but something Natsu couldn't read flickered in his eyes for a split second. Natsu didn't know what it was, but at least it was  _something_. The dragon slayer straightened up again and turned slightly so that he could see everyone else as well.

"Why don't you all finish eating while I go set up my room for Gray?" he suggested in a more pleasant tone of voice.

Sting and Happy nodded mutely, while Rogue just stared at him with a stunned expression. Turning on his heel, Natsu headed out of the kitchen. He walked directly to his room and stripped the sheets off the bed. Replacing them with (mostly) clean ones, he glanced about the room to see if there was anything else he should change to prepare it for Gray to sleep here tonight. He halfheartedly picked a few things up off the floor, but he doubted that his friend would care about how clean the space was, and he himself didn't see the point in being overly neat. Instead of worrying about straightening up, he gathered up an armful of blankets and arranged them on the couch in the living area for him and Happy to use tonight.

He loitered around for a few more minutes before reluctantly going back to the kitchen. Stopping in the doorway, he took a second to survey the scene. Happy and the Sabertooth mages had started up another conversation to cut through the oppressive silence that Natsu's sudden departure had left. They would occasionally direct a question or comment at Gray in the hopes of getting him to talk, but the ice mage said very little. Natsu noticed that he had at least eaten the sandwich though. He figured that he might have the other mages' prodding to thank for that, since Gray had seemed unenthusiastic about it at best. Everyone else had finished their meal as well, and Rogue was washing dishes with a quick efficiency as Happy and Sting chatted away at the table.

Natsu headed over to the sink and silently picked up a towel so that he could start drying the dishes as Rogue washed them. That task was easy enough, although he had to be a little more creative at finding places for the now-clean dishes to go since he didn't have set places for much of anything around here.

The conversation faltered as he entered the room, and everyone was watching him carefully, probably waiting to see if he was going to have another meltdown.

"I fixed up the bedroom for Gray," Natsu said conversationally, not looking up from the plate he was drying. He shoved it into the nearest cabinet, not concerned that the space was already filled with an assortment of chipped bowls, a couple pots, a lid that didn't match any of the pots in question, and something that looked suspiciously like a half-melted frying pan. He had always preferred the eclectic approach. "Sting and Rogue, you two can stay in the guestroom like usual. Happy, you and I are going to be on the living room couch tonight."

"We can always take the living room," Sting offered.

"Of course not," Natsu countered dismissively as he opened another cabinet and dumped a now-dry glass on top of a pile that consisted of pots, serving spoons, an empty saltshaker, and a half-full bottle of ketchup. The stack wobbled dangerously but didn't fall, so Natsu decided that it was perfectly fine the way it was. No need to fix something that wasn't broken yet. "My house, my rules. You stay where I put you."

"If you're sure…" Sting answered slowly.

Rogue only hummed distractedly. Natsu glanced over to see that he had paused in washing a plate and was staring into the open cabinet with a pained expression.

"What?" Natsu asked.

Rogue grimaced slightly and tore his eyes away from the disaster zone. He scrubbed at the plate with renewed vigor.

"Nothing," he muttered.

Natsu eyed him for a moment before shrugging and slamming the cabinet door shut. "If it bothers you that much then you can organize it later," he said dryly, amusement coloring his voice. "Just be aware that it'll be a mess again within days."

"It's fine," Rogue mumbled in embarrassment as he finished washing the last of the dishes and handed them over to Natsu, who swiped a towel across them carelessly and jammed the still-damp objects into various cabinets and drawers.

"Hey, Happy!" Natsu suddenly exclaimed in excitement, momentarily forgetting what he had been about to say. "I found that sock I've been looking for! Now the other one will finally have a match again!"

He pulled the offending sock out of the cabinet he had been shoving the plate into, and waved it around enthusiastically.

"About time," Happy answered, unsurprised. Losing things and finding them again in odd places was commonplace here. "You've been complaining about it for weeks and it was driving me crazy."

Sting and Rogue looked faintly stunned at this revelation, and even more disturbed that neither Natsu nor Happy seemed to think that it was anything out of the ordinary.

"You found a sock…" Sting said slowly, "…in your kitchen cabinet…"

"Yep," Natsu agreed. "Don't know why I never checked here. This is where things always seem to end up when we can't find them anywhere else. I can't wait to wear it again!" He sniffed at it and immediately wrinkled his nose. "Well, maybe I'll wash it first."

Sting and Rogue looked vaguely sickened.

Natsu stuffed the sock into his pocket and opened his mouth to speak, but lost his train of thought when he noticed that Gray was watching the proceedings with a faintly amused air. The ice mage's eyes sparkled slightly and looked more alive than usual, and one corner of his mouth was quirked upwards in a fair approximation of a half-smile. Natsu blinked at him stupidly for a moment.

"Are you smiling?" he blurted out.

Gray looked mildly bewildered, and now that his attention had been called to his unconscious behavior, all traces of amusement faded away. "Why would I be?"

His confusion seemed genuine, leading Natsu to believe that he hadn't been fully aware of his expression. The dragon slayer smiled in turn. Gray might not be consciously aware of his emotions and his behaviors might change if he actually focused his attention on them, but it still gave Natsu hope. Maybe someday soon Gray would learn how to understand and express his feelings properly again. Natsu would make him learn to feel again, make him understand the meaning and value of existence, make him remember that he was someone. But those were all lessons for tomorrow, so the dragon slayer simply smiled and suggested that they all go to bed.

After ushering Sting and Rogue into the guestroom, he returned to Gray's side to help the still-unsteady mage stay upright. Natsu noticed that Gray's balance and coordination seemed to have improved somewhat, and the ice mage made it all the way to the bedroom with only minimal assistance. The setup of the room and the expectations placed upon him seemed to puzzle Gray slightly, so Natsu patiently directed him on how bedrooms and sleeping were supposed to work. Once he had settled Gray in the bed, the dragon slayer hovered uncertainly in the doorway, reluctant to leave his friend alone.

"Is there anything else I can get you?" he asked hopefully.

Gray stared back at him dully. "I wouldn't know."

"Oh." Natsu glanced away. "Well, if you need anything else to make you comfortable, I'll be right outside in the living room. Feel free to wake me up."

Gray didn't respond at first, but when Natsu made no move to leave, he sighed. "Okay."

Natsu loitered by the door for a moment longer before letting out a breath and flicking out the light. "Goodnight, Gray."

The ice mage didn't reply, so Natsu reluctantly stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. He stared blankly at the door for a moment, fighting the urge to open it right back up and go inside again. He could still barely believe that Gray was back, and he was almost afraid that if he couldn't see his friend anymore, Gray might disappear again. But there was nothing more to be done about it for now, so Natsu eventually turned away and headed back into the main living area. Happy was curled up in a nest of blankets that he had assembled on a nearby armchair, and watched the dragon slayer carefully as Natsu padded past him.

"Are you okay, Natsu?" the little cat asked.

Natsu shrugged as he shut off the light and created a small flame in the palm of his hand so that he didn't trip over anything on his way to the sofa. He settled himself on the couch, stretching his legs out along its length and pulling the blankets snugly around his body. The flame flickered out and the room was plunged into darkness.

"Yeah," he said finally. "It's just a lot to take in. Tomorrow will be better. It's going to be a big day since we're going to have to start on our plans to fix Gray, so get some sleep."

"Okay," Happy said after a brief pause. "Goodnight, Natsu."

"Goodnight, Happy."

Natsu lay motionless on the couch and stared sightlessly up at the ceiling, listening to the slight rustle of blankets as Happy snuggled deeper into his makeshift nest. The dragon slayer was exhausted from all the emotional strain and tension of the previous weeks and past few hours, but he couldn't sleep. Instead, he stared at the darkened ceiling long after he heard Happy's breathing deepen and even out. Having lived with the little cat for years, Natsu could tell almost the exact moment that the Exceed fell asleep. He listened to Happy's rhythmic breathing for a half hour or so before letting out a sigh of frustration and sitting up. It was no use. He wasn't going to be falling asleep any time soon.

Carefully untangling himself from the blankets, Natsu wriggled off the couch and stood indecisively in the middle of the dark room for a few seconds. His keen eyes could pick out the dark shadow of Happy's sleeping form, and for a moment he wished that he could fall asleep that easily. Then he began picking his way soundlessly across the room, avoiding all of the floorboards he knew creaked so as not to wake his friend. He paused by the guestroom for a moment. His sharp hearing could make out the two sets of deep breathing coming from inside, and he knew that Sting and Rogue had already managed to fall asleep as well.

Then he quietly tiptoed over to the bedroom again and stopped outside the door. Pressing his ear against the wood, he frowned a little. His ears were keen enough to hear breathing, but Gray's breaths were shallow enough that they were difficult to pick up. At first Natsu couldn't hear Gray breathing at all and felt a stab of panic, but then he caught the faintest whoosh of air and relaxed a little. If he listened hard enough, he could make out every few exhales. The irregular pattern made him think that Gray wasn't asleep yet either, and Natsu felt the urge to just go in there and try to talk to his friend. His heart clenched painfully and he had to forcibly stop himself from bursting in the door. There was something terribly heartbreaking about having Gray in the next room but not being able to reach him. Natsu missed the days when he could just walk up to his best friend and start a conversation or a brawl. One day he  _would_ get that back, but for now he needed to accept that he couldn't have that again yet.

But at the same time he couldn't make himself leave, so Natsu stayed with his ear pressed up against the door, listening to Gray's almost non-existent breaths. He didn't know how long he stayed in that same position, but his muscles were cramping painfully by the time he finally heard Gray's breathing even out. Natsu listened for a few minutes longer to confirm that the ice mage was asleep before straightening out and stretching his limbs.

He really should just go to bed, but he couldn't seem to make himself do it. He still couldn't quite believe that Gray was in the next room, and there was a vague fear in the back of his mind that if he fell asleep then he would wake up the next morning only to realize that this had all been an elaborate dream. There was something comforting about being able to hear Gray's breathing so that he at least had some tangible proof that this was really happening and Gray really was here.

Natsu let out a shaky breath and pressed his back against the door. Letting himself slide to the ground, he closed his eyes and rested his head against the wooden surface. From this position he could still hear Gray's soft breathing, and it helped him relax a little. He would have to go back to the couch to sleep eventually, but he could stay here for just a few minutes more. He fully intended to return to the couch at some point, but before he could do so, the soothing rhythm of Gray's breathing lulled him into a dreamless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was a strange mix of humor and angst... I honestly didn't mean to include such a fleshed-out version of this scene, but I think it's useful to help set up the mindsets of both Gray and Natsu, so I left it in. I don't really know where the idea for Natsu's crazy kitchen cabinets came from (aside from the fact that he's canonically messy) but after this it kind of became normal headcanon for me, ha ha.


	10. Ch 9-Natsu finds a secret in the cabinet

**Chapter 9**

_(In which Natsu finds a secret in the cabinet and Gray gets a checkup.)_

* * *

Natsu woke to the smell of burning food and grimaced. Only he was allowed to burn down his house. Yawing and stretching groggily, he prepared to go chew someone out, but as he made to stand up, the blankets tangled around his limbs sent him crashing to the ground. Blinking slowly, his mind still trying to wake up, Natsu pushed himself upright and looked around uncomprehendingly. He could have sworn that he had fallen asleep on the floor outside of Gray's room, but he had most definitely just fallen off the couch. Untangling himself from the blankets, he dumped the offending fabric back onto the sofa. His best guess was that either Happy or one of the Sabertooth mages had found him sleeping on the floor this morning and had moved him to the couch. Well. That was a little embarrassing.

But Natsu would worry about that later, because right now it smelled like someone was burning down his kitchen.

He walked to the other room and leaned against the doorway as he took in the scene. Sting was cursing colorfully as he stood by the stove with a pan of charred bacon, waving a hand through the air in a vain attempt to dissipate the cloud of smoke curling through the room. Rogue was standing beside him with a smug look on his face, and Happy hovered in the air behind them as he laughed his head off. Gray was seated at the kitchen table watching the trio with an air of indifference. He was wearing some of Natsu's old clothes, so the dragon slayer assumed that Happy must have been helping him get ready.

"Minerva makes it look so easy," Sting grumbled, scowling at the blackened remains of their breakfast. "I don't get it."

"Even Natsu can cook bacon," Happy taunted gleefully.

"Are you sure you don't just want me to do it?" Rogue asked dryly.

Sting's scowl deepened. "No, I can do it."

"Oh really?" Natsu drawled. Everyone looked over at him as he pushed himself away from the doorframe and sauntered across the room to stand by Sting and take in the bacon in all its blackened glory. "Honestly, you can't even burn things right."

He snatched up the crumbling strips and lit them up in a dazzling blaze of fire that died out after a few seconds, leaving nothing behind. Natsu watched the ruined food disappear with a sense of satisfaction.

"Showoff," Happy muttered.

Natsu smirked over at the little cat. "Don't be so jealous, Happy."

"I'm  _not_ ," the Exceed insisted with a pout. "You're just sore because you were the last one up."

This was the point where Natsu expected someone to jump in with a teasing remark about how they had found him sprawled across the floor, but Happy seemed content to stick out his tongue and drop the subject. Neither Sting nor Rogue commented on it either, and Natsu decided not to press the issue. He was perfectly fine with sweeping that incident under the rug like it had never happened, and he was grateful that whoever had found him wasn't going to make a big deal out of it.

"Is that normal?"

Natsu twisted around to look at Gray. The ice mage was watching him with an unreadable expression, but his tone was almost curious.

"Maybe not for other people, but it is for me," Natsu answered cheerfully. "I  _do_ have fire magic, along with my super awesome dragon slaying skills."

Gray just eyed him for a moment before shaking his head slightly. Natsu wondered what he found so interesting about magic.

"It suits you, I suppose," Gray murmured after a moment, as whatever faint interest he had been harboring faded away like it had never been there at all.

Natsu frowned a little at that, unsure of what his friend was talking about. "What do you mean?" he asked.

Gray shrugged. "You seem to always be making something out of nothing. You did it in the void, you do it with fire, and I think you're trying to do it with me."

Natsu considered that. He supposed he could see the other mage's point. It  _would_  seem like he kept making things appear out of nothing, from Gray's perspective. After all, Gray had been stuck in a void of nothingness for a long time before Natsu had appeared and dragged him back into the real world where existence was the norm. Natsu could understand that. He could even see why Gray might make a connection between that and Natsu's fire, since the dragon slayer could use his magic to create fire at will, seemingly out of thin air.

It was the last assertion that gave him a moment's pause as he puzzled it out. He wasn't quite sure what Gray meant, until he recalled part of their conversation from the previous night. Gray had asserted that he was no one, and Natsu had made it clear that he was determined to change his mind about that. The dragon slayer supposed that Gray could see that as Natsu trying to take the nothingness he believed himself to be and turn it into something that existed. Gray thought he was no one and nothing, and Natsu was trying to make him into someone again. That thought sickened Natsu a little bit, because he didn't want Gray to feel like nothing.

However, he was fairly certain that trying to start an argument with the ice mage wouldn't be very productive right now, so he took another tack instead.

"Well, you can do it too, of course," he said finally, with forced cheerfulness.

"I don't understand," Gray said flatly, his eyes blank and uncomprehending.

"You're a mage too," Natsu explained. "You can make and manipulate ice." He grimaced slightly and looked away. "Although I guess you wouldn't remember how to do that now."

Gray shrugged again and hummed noncommittally, unimpressed by that assertion. It wasn't clear whether or not he actually believed the dragon slayer, or if he even cared one way or the other. With nothing else to really be done about the matter, Natsu decided to leave it at that and he turned away, noticing the time on the kitchen clock as he did so. His eyes widened.

"It's already after eleven o'clock?" he asked, aghast. "Why didn't someone wake me up?"

Sting and Rogue exchanged uncertain looks, but Happy was uncowed.

"You haven't been sleeping very well with all the excitement these past few weeks," the Exceed said, his eyes daring Natsu to disagree. "You could use some extra sleep."

The two friends locked gazes in a staring match for a few seconds, but Happy was determinedly unapologetic, so Natsu finally sighed and gave in.

"Alright, alright. But you must know that everyone at the guild will have been waiting for us to show up with Gray. I'm sure they expected us to arrive a long time ago. Juvia will try to drown me if she thinks I did anything to Gray."

"Oh." Happy winced involuntarily. "I should have thought to send them a message, but there's nothing for it now. I hope Erza isn't too angry."

That thought made Natsu wince as well.

"Oh well, they'll just have to wait. But this means that we don't really have time for amateur cooking lessons," he added, smirking over at Sting. The other dragon slayer threw his hands up and rolled his eyes. "I'll make breakfast."

He nudged Sting out of the way to take a look at the mess on the stove. "Well, your first problem is that you were trying to use a pan that's way too small for all this bacon," he said dryly, waving the offending pan around.

"We couldn't find a better one," Sting grumbled. "Your cabinets are a mess and it's impossible to find anything."

Natsu began opening up various cabinets to look for a more suitable skillet, searching through teetering stacks of random junk in his quest. "Why didn't you ask Happy? He can find things."

"He was helping Gray around and finding him clothes," Rogue volunteered. "Sting thought he would make some breakfast while he was busy."

He gave his friend a pointed look, and Sting groaned a little.

"Okay, okay, I'll say it: you were right, and I can't cook. Happy now?"

"No, but it's very satisfying."

Sting rolled his eyes. "But seriously, how do you ever find anything in here?" he asked, deciding to ignore his friend in favor of harassing Natsu some more. "You wouldn't believe the things we found while we were digging through your stuff. All sorts of mismatched dishes, a half-melted cookie sheet, a pan with like three years' worth of dried grease on it, an old magazine, a bunch of cracked eggshells, a block of cheese so moldy we couldn't tell what kind it was, something that might have been a shirt at one point, and…What was that other weird thing we found?"

Sting frowned in concentration as he racked his memory.

"A mousetrap," Rogue volunteered.

Sting's eyes lit up and he nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah! A mousetrap. Why would there be a mousetrap in your cabinets?"

"Because Happy is a bad cat and won't eat the mice," Natsu mumbled absently as he sifted through a pile of junk in one of the lower cabinets.

There was a brief pause.

"You have mice?" Sting asked apprehensively.

Natsu smirked as he shut the cabinet and moved to the next one. "No, but I bet the look on your face was priceless."

"It was!" Happy crowed, cackling wildly.

"Ha ha," Sting grumbled. "So why  _do_ you have mousetraps then?"

"Why not?" Natsu asked flippantly. "Honestly, I have no idea. We find the strangest things in here sometimes. Like this, for instance." He pulled a half-empty box of crackers out from where it had been squished under a pile of bowls, and reached up to deposit it on the kitchen counter without standing up. "Neither Happy nor I eat crackers and I've never seen that box before in my life, but here they are. Makes life more interesting, at least. These cabinets are one of life's great mysteries. You call it inconvenience, I call it adventure. Same thing."

"I'm not sure I follow your logic, but do whatever makes you happy," Rogue said dryly.

"I will, thanks," Natsu answered cheerfully.

He rummaged around a little more. Pushing aside a pitcher and a gigantic metal mixing bowl he'd never used once in his life, he finally spotted what he was looking for. Pulling it out of the cupboard, he waved it in the air triumphantly.

"I found the bacon pan!" he announced in victory.

"About time," Rogue muttered.

Natsu laughed and was about to stand up and get to cooking when his sensitive hearing picked up a slight clinking sound as a small object fell to the ground, displaced by all of his shifting things about. He reached down to pick it up and replace it in the cabinet, but when he saw what it was, he froze.

"Happy," he said, his voice suddenly devoid of humor, "what is this doing here?"

Happy had been laughing and making a silly comment to the Sabertooth mages, but when he heard the sudden shift in Natsu's tone, he immediately sobered.

"Natsu? What is it?"

"You tell me," the dragon slayer said, his voice wavering dangerously.

He stood up, the skillet forgotten on the floor, and turned slowly. The others took in his white face drained of blood and their worried expressions deepened. Then they all looked at the object he was holding. Natsu didn't look at them. His gaze was fixed on the necklace held in his trembling hands too.

"Oh," Happy said quietly. "I knew I should have found a better place to hide that."

Natsu finally tore his gaze away from the familiar necklace so that he could stare at Happy instead. "Why do we have this?"

Happy's tail drooped and he slowly drifted to the floor, his wings folding back and disappearing as his paws hit the ground. He couldn't quite meet Natsu's eyes.

"The others…They thought that you might like to have it, since you weren't here when Gray…Well, I guess they tried to give it to Lyon, but he told them to give it to you since he had other things to remember Gray by and because he knew you'd be upset when you came back and found Gray gone. Now that Juvia told us how he kept everything in the apartment, I guess that's what he meant."

Natsu wasn't interested in why Lyon wouldn't want the necklace or what other things of Gray's he might have, and he definitely didn't want to hear all of Happy's stalling.

"If they wanted me to have it, then why did they give it to you?" he asked flatly.

Happy shifted uncomfortably, and Sting and Rogue backed up a few steps as they watched the exchange with wide eyes. "Because it was right after you came back, and you were still hiding here instead of going to the guild. They asked me to give it to you."

"Then why didn't you give it to me?"

Happy finally met his eyes, and Natsu could see the indecision and anguish written on the little cat's face. "Because I didn't think you could handle it."

"You didn't think I could handle it," Natsu repeated numbly, his eyes drifting back down to the necklace.

"Well you  _couldn't_!" Happy burst out finally, suddenly losing all his guilty hesitation as his voice hardened with determination. "You wouldn't eat, you couldn't sleep, you had terrible nightmares even when you did sleep so that you'd wake up screaming, you didn't want to leave the house, you were always distracted thinking about those stupid memories and how guilty you felt, and you cried for weeks! And you were scaring me because you would pretend to be perfectly fine but then you'd start  _saying_  things. You were falling apart, Natsu. Between everything that happened with Igneel and Gray, you couldn't handle anything else."

Natsu stared at Happy dully, his gut twisting uncomfortably. He remembered those days, back in the beginning when he had first learned what had happened to Gray and had realized what he had done and lost. He had always felt bad for frightening Happy, but he hadn't been able to help it back then. Those had been dark times that he had had to claw his way out of, and it had been a hard fight the whole way. It had taken him a long time to start functioning semi-normally again and even afterwards, once things had finally started getting a little better, he hadn't really been the same. He had felt so  _guilty_ about leaving Gray to die, and he hadn't been able to let go of that. And it was true that he would sometimes say some…out of character, possibly frightening things. He knew that it had worried Happy a lot.

But still.

He opened his mouth to protest, but Happy beat him to the punch.

"And then there was that damn  _flower_!"

Natsu felt his expression instantly close off, and he stared at Happy guardedly. "What flower?"

Happy threw him a scathing look. The Exceed didn't seem very apologetic anymore, now that he had gotten all worked up.

"'What flower?'" he repeated with a sharp laugh. "You know perfectly well what flower. The flower you brought back from the grave."

Natsu blinked at the feline, his mouth twisting into a pained grimace. He hadn't realized that Happy had noticed how caught up he was with that stupid flower. He had thought that he was pretty careful to keep it to himself.

"You really think I didn't notice?" Happy asked, correctly interpreting his friend's expression. "You put it on the windowsill and you'd just  _stare_ at it. Sometimes you'd try to be sneaky about it, but you'd always end up watching it again. You pretty much stared at it for days until it died. And then you buried it in the garden and cried over it. You  _cried_ over it."

Natsu recoiled a half-step and looked at Happy with a faintly horrified expression. "I thought you were asleep," he said numbly.

"I was," the Exceed agreed. "But when you left you woke me up, and I watched you through the window. But really, that flower had only the weakest of connections to Gray. If you got that obsessed with a flower, then what do you think would have happened if I gave you that necklace?"

They stared at each other for a moment longer before Natsu's shoulders slumped and he seemed to shrink into himself.

"Okay," Natsu said quietly. "You're right. I couldn't have handled it. I'm sorry."

He was still shocked that Happy had been keeping such a big secret, but he could also understand why his friend had done it. Happy was right: Natsu would have gotten obsessed with the necklace, just like he had been obsessed with that silly flower. And it would have been even worse, because the necklace was intimately linked to Gray and it wouldn't have shriveled up and died within a few days. It would have been a permanent, all-consuming fixation.

Happy deflated as well, his furry features melting into an expression of concern and sadness and guilt.

"I'm sorry too," he said tiredly. "I thought it was for the best."

"I know," Natsu murmured, rubbing the necklace's chain with his still-shaking fingers. He tried to give Happy a smile, but that turned out shaky as well. "I guess I deserved it for lying to you about the fishing trip," he added, trying for a more lighthearted atmosphere.

Happy's ears flattened again. "Except that I hid this from you a long time before the whole fishing incident. Knowing that, I guess I shouldn't have been so mad at you for lying."

"Oh well," Natsu said with another wobbly smile. "Why don't we just call it even now?"

"Okay," Happy whispered.

They all stood in silence for several seconds longer. Then Natsu looked back down at Gray's necklace clutched in his hand and found that his entire body had started shaking.

"God," he breathed, his voice cracking. "I shouldn't have left."

Hot tears pricked at the corners of his eyes and he blinked rapidly in a vain attempt to push them back.

"Oh, Natsu," Happy said sadly.

"But you came back," Rogue interjected quietly. "And you were the one who came up with the whole crazy plan to save Gray. And it  _worked_."

"Maybe everything isn't back to normal yet," Sting added, "but everyone will keep fighting until Gray remembers everything again. Everything will be okay."

Natsu let out a breathless laugh and swiped at his tears. "Yeah," he whispered. "Okay."

He jerked back in surprise as he realized that Gray had risen silently from his seat at the kitchen table and made his way over to stand in front of him. The ice mage was still a little wobbly, but he was doing much better than last night and didn't need any help crossing the floor. The pair stared at each other for a few seconds. Gray's expression was completely unreadable, but after a moment his gaze drifted down to the necklace Natsu was holding, and he slowly held out a hand.

Natsu hesitated for a moment and then dropped the necklace into his outstretched palm. He watched Gray with bated breath, hoping against hope that an object that had once been so precious to him might awaken some kind of memory. He thought that the others might feel the same way since no one dared to speak as they watched Gray to see what he would do next.

The ice mage examined the necklace with flat eyes, turning it over in his hands and rubbing the silver sword with his pale fingers. He didn't say anything, but after several long moments, he looked back up at Natsu. The dragon slayer let out his breath in a disappointed sigh, seeing that no new light had entered his friend's eyes.

"It's yours," Natsu said quietly. "Keep it."

Gray hesitated and looked back down at the necklace uncertainly.

"Put it on," Natsu urged. Gray still didn't move, so the dragon slayer felt the need to clarify himself. "Over your head, around your neck."

Gray remained motionless for a moment before following Natsu's directions and slipping the chain over his head. Natsu let out another shuddering breath and smiled at him tearfully. It was good to see him with his necklace again, even if he didn't remember it yet.

Gray blinked at him for a moment. He didn't return Natsu's smile, but he brushed the dragon slayer's arm with the lightest of touches before dropping his hand and turning away. Natsu watched him return to his chair at the table, rubbing absently at the spot Gray had touched. It would have been almost a comforting gesture, if Gray had still understood emotions. Perhaps it had been a remnant of unconscious memory that had guided the ice mage, but even if it hadn't been intended as or understood as a gesture of comfort, it still gave Natsu a spark of hope. Maybe there was still something left of Gray in this body.

After Gray sat back down, he fixed Natsu with those expressionless eyes again, as if nothing had happened. Natsu stared back for a few more seconds before he leaned down and picked the skillet up. Turning back to Happy and the Sabertooth mages, he offered them a small smile. Then he fixed his gaze on Sting and raised an eyebrow.

"Now let me show you how to cook breakfast properly."

* * *

"Prepare yourselves," Natsu advised grimly as the five of them stood outside the doors of the guild hall half an hour later.

"Just do it fast, like a band aid," Happy suggested. "If we survive the first two minutes then we should be okay."

Sting and Rogue exchanged half-amused, half-concerned glances. They probably thought that the Fairy Tail mages were overreacting, but they also didn't know just how frightening Erza and Juvia could be. Gray looked neither amused nor frightened, and he said nothing. In fact, he hadn't said a word since the necklace incident. Technically he hadn't said anything then either, so the last time he had really spoken was back when he asked Natsu about his magic. But he also hadn't been very talkative to begin with, so Natsu chose not to worry about it. The ice mage had managed to walk all the way here on his own, and for now, that progress seemed to be enough to outweigh his reticence. Sure he had stumbled quite a few times and his movements still had a strangely mechanical jerkiness to them, but they could work on that.

Pulling himself out of his thoughts, Natsu turned, took a deep breath, and slammed the doors open with as much force as he could muster. If they were going to be late anyway, they might as well make a flashy entrance. He stepped into the guild hall, apologies already on the tip of his tongue.

"Sorry we're so late," he babbled hurriedly, his eyes quickly searching through the sea of faces to look for Erza and see just how much trouble they were in. "But you know, we're here now and—"

"You have some nerve making me wait on you so long," someone griped.

Natsu did a double take, immediately tearing his gaze away from Erza to see Porlyusica sitting at one of the tables with a sour expression on her face.

"Huh?" he asked stupidly, surprised to see the healer already sitting in their guild hall. "What are you doing here?"

Porlyusica gave him a withering glare. Natsu withered appropriately in response.

"You all asked me to come, didn't you?" she asked him scathingly.

"Um, yeah," Natsu stammered, still bewildered by her sudden appearance. "I just didn't expect you to be here already."

"Charle and I went to ask her to come early this morning," Wendy told him. "And she was kind enough to come with us right away."

Porlyusica made a disgruntled sound at Wendy's nerve in daring to call her 'kind', but she seemed to have lost interest in the dragon slayers already. Her eyes were fixed on Gray, who was standing between Natsu and Happy. She studied him carefully, emotions Natsu couldn't read flickering in her eyes. He was reminded of how everyone had said that she was upset about not being able to save Gray. Perhaps that was why she had come here in such a hurry.

"Well let's take a look—"

She was suddenly cut off as Juvia and Meredy walked in the side door and immediately took stock of the situation.

"Gray-sama!" Juvia cried, abandoning Meredy and running towards her beloved at full speed.

Gray hadn't appeared interested in her appearance or her calling of his name, but her sudden movement certainly caught his attention. Something vaguely reminiscent of alarm or discomfort crossed his face. Taking a half-step back, he inched closer to Natsu. If Gray had still understood the meanings behind different emotions and gestures, Natsu would have said that he was seeking protection from the dragon slayer. As it was, the ice mage didn't seem fully aware of his instinctive actions or the meaning behind them, but Natsu decided to intervene anyway.

"Hey, calm down, Juvia," he said hurriedly, holding out a hand to make her stop. Juvia skidded to a halt a few feet away, looking hurt. "Sorry," he told her. "Just slow down and don't get too…clingy. You remember how easily he gets overwhelmed now."

Juvia deflated a little. "Juvia is sorry," she apologized contritely, her eyes still fixed on Gray with a hungry expression. "How is Gray-sama today?"

Natsu waited for Gray to give her an answer, even if it was just one of those flat, noncommittal responses he was so prone to give now, but he said nothing. The dragon slayer frowned over at him.

"How are you feeling?" he prodded after the silence stretched on a little too long.

Gray tore his gaze away from Juvia and looked at Natsu instead. He blinked at the dragon slayer for a moment before something resembling comprehension flashed in his eyes for a brief instant. He shrugged.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Lucy asked worriedly, edging forward to peer at Gray.

Gray shrugged again. "How would I know?"

Natsu decided that it was high time to intervene again.

"That's his new favorite answer to everything," the dragon slayer explained. "There are still a lot of things he doesn't really understand. Even if something seems like a really basic question to you, it might not be so obvious to him."

No one seemed very pleased at that, but they accepted it because it's not like they had any other choice. Erza stepped forward as well, studying Gray carefully.

"I'll forgive your tardiness this time, Natsu, but only because we have more important things to worry about right now," she said absently. Natsu breathed a silent sigh of relief as she continued on. "How do  _you_ think he was doing last night and today, Natsu?"

Natsu let his gaze rest contemplatively on Gray as he considered the question. The ice mage seemed completely unfazed by the fact that everyone was staring at him, even though the old Gray would have quickly gotten uncomfortable with the attention.

"It's very…complicated," Natsu said finally. "He still doesn't remember anything, there are certain concepts he doesn't understand, he doesn't know how to use his magic, and he's very…flat. Like…He's not very emotional and he isn't interested in much of anything, but sometimes he'll display some kind of muted emotion or be briefly interested in something. I mean, there are good things too though. Sometimes he'll do things instinctively or unconsciously, even if he doesn't realize that he's doing them or understand why. And his motor skills have improved a lot. He still moves strangely, but he walked all the way here mostly on his own."

Erza nodded thoughtfully. "And how did he do with having so many people around him? Did he get too overwhelmed?"

Natsu shrugged. "It's kind of like how he is now. He isn't always bothered by people paying attention to him because he doesn't really care enough, but sometimes he'll get overwhelmed if he tries to process too much information at once or if you surprise him with sudden movements and things. But on the bright side, he seemed to get along alright with Sting and Rogue, even though Sting talks a mile a minute."

Sting made to protest, but paused as Gray spoke up.

"I don't understand," the ice mage said flatly.

They all stared at him. Natsu frowned a little as he searched back through his words, looking for whichever concept had puzzled Gray enough to actually convince him to speak up. He was about to ask what it was that was so confusing, but then a thought struck him.

"Oh, you mean you don't understand who Sting and Rogue are?" he asked.

Gray blinked at him for a moment before shrugging and nodding slightly.

"Man, I completely forgot that you wouldn't remember anyone's names yet," Natsu groaned, facepalming. "You should have said something. That's Sting and that's Rogue." He pointed out the respective dragon slayers. "And that's Happy," he added, gesturing towards the Exceed. "We're going to have to do introductions for everyone."

Gray's expression didn't change and he didn't respond, making Natsu feel a little uncomfortable.

"Do you remember my name?" he asked after a moment.

"No."

Natsu grimaced slightly. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised. He had only given Gray his name once, back in the void. "I'm Natsu."

"Hm."

Natsu was going to leave it at that, but something in Gray's blank, uninterested gaze made him uneasy. He felt a sudden sinking sensation.

"Who's that?" he demanded, pointing at Sting.

The other dragon slayer leaned back slightly, looking a little nonplussed at the unexpected gesture. No such surprise appeared on Gray's face. The ice mage glanced over at Sting and then returned his unsettling gaze to Natsu.

"I don't know," he said expressionlessly.

Someone sucked in a sharp breath behind Natsu, but the dragon slayer's attention was focused entirely on Gray. A sickening suspicion was forming in the back of his mind.

"Is it really that hard for you to remember names?" Lisanna asked curiously, her eyes sad and a little bewildered.

Gray looked at her and shrugged. "I don't know."

Her confused frown deepened. "Why wouldn't you know? Unless…"

"Unless he didn't try," Natsu finished flatly. Gray looked over at him again, and Natsu stared at him with a fierce intensity. "Why didn't you try?"

Gray shrugged apathetically once more, and Natsu ground his teeth together. That stupid shrugging thing was getting on his nerves.

"Names are for distinguishing things," the ice mage answered. "I have never had any need of names."

"You mean, you can't tell us apart?" Lucy asked, her eyes wide with horror.

"I can see the differences," Gray said, his eyes wandering away as he lost interest in her. "I distinguish between you as much as I need to, but I don't need names to do it. Names are useless if there's nothing to name."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Lucy whispered, still stunned.

"It means that nothing existed in the void, so names weren't important," Natsu answered, his eyes boring into Gray's head. "You guys don't understand. There was nothing there, so what good were names? And I think he's still half-convinced that nothing exists, so why would he need names for things? He still doesn't know how to care. You all didn't feel what I felt when I was in the void. He literally does not understand how to care about things. Nothing has any meaning for him. Right now, we don't mean a whole lot to him, so why would he bother learning our names?"

Everyone looked horrified. Gray shifted slightly, and if he didn't know better, then Natsu would say that he was actually looking a little uncomfortable.

"Names don't seem very important," the ice mage muttered.

Natsu frowned at him. Recalling the conversations he had had with Gray last night and back in the void, and considering the more recent time when the ice mage had ignored Juvia a few minutes ago, Natsu took the next logical leap.

"Do you know your name?" he asked slowly.

Gray stared at him with those dead eyes. "No. I told you, I don't have one."

Natsu's mouth twisted into a pained grimace. "Because you're no one? Because you're nothing?" he asked softly.

Gray nodded. Natsu laughed darkly.

"Gray. Your name is Gray. I told you that I was going to change your mind about all of that, and I meant it."

Something like understanding flickered in Gray's eyes and he glanced over at Juvia for a moment before returning his gaze to Natsu.

"You never did listen to me," he said, the barest hint of dry amusement touching his voice.

For a moment Natsu couldn't breathe, because that sounded almost like something Gray would have said back when he still had his memories. But he knew that his friend was just talking about how stubborn Natsu had been back in the void and last night, not about anything that had happened before this whole mess. And he doubted that Gray was feeling much of anything, much less amusement. Maybe Natsu was just projecting the emotions and thoughts onto Gray that he wanted his friend to feel.

"Are you quite finished yet?" Porlyusica interrupted irritably. "Do you want me to do this checkup or not?"

Natsu looked over at her in surprise, having already forgotten that she was there. In all honesty, he was surprised that she hadn't interrupted them sooner. Perhaps she was just as interested in learning about Gray's state of mind as the rest of them were.

"Sorry," Erza apologized. "Go ahead and take a look at him."

"Come here," the medicine woman ordered Gray, beckoning sharply.

Gray hesitated for a moment and then looked at Natsu. The dragon slayer wasn't sure why he seemed to be looking to him for permission or guidance, but he nodded his head anyway. Gray looked back at Porlyusica and slowly walked over to her, his movements jerky but good enough to get him across the room without sending him crashing to the ground. Porlyusica watched him carefully, and Natsu wondered if she had called him over to her instead of going to him because she had wanted to assess the current state of his motor skills. Gray stopped in front of her.

"What are you looking for, exactly?" Erza asked curiously as she drifted over to the two of them.

Porlyusica shrugged. "I'm not sure I'll be able to do anything about his memory loss or mental state, but I can check for any physical problems. I wouldn't be surprised if I found something, either. His body was in the ground for a year and a half, not to mention the fact that he was coughing up blood and having seizures before you buried him. Even if those were all effects of the curse, it might have left some real, lasting damage."

Natsu grimaced. He hadn't even really considered that. Well, he had been vaguely aware of the possibility, but the whole memory problem had taken over everyone's focus so that no one had really paid much mind to any potential physical issues. He watched Porlyusica closely as she examined Gray. She poked and prodded and listened and asked Gray to do simple tasks. Natsu had no idea what exactly she was doing, but he was content to let her do her thing in peace. Even if he wanted to know, he had enough of a sense of self-preservation to keep his mouth shut.

Gray obediently followed all of her instructions, but when she started asking him basic questions, he was far less helpful.

"Have you been experiencing any physical discomfort?" she asked as she prodded at his arm with a frown.

He stared at her blankly. "I don't know."

She blinked up at him and tried again. "Are you in any pain?"

"I don't know."

"How am I supposed to work with this?" she asked no one in particular, a scowl creasing her face.

"He's not trying to be difficult," Natsu explained, trying to soothe her. "There are still a lot of things he doesn't understand."

Porlyusica was not so easily soothed and would not be deterred by such a setback. Ignoring Natsu, she continued on her line of questioning.

"Have you been having difficulty breathing?"

"I don't know," Gray repeated again, watching her with polite disinterest.

"Look," Natsu tried again. "He still doesn't understand how he should normally feel, so he doesn't know if anything is out of the ordinary. You should really—"

Porlyusica switched her irritated glare to Natsu. "Have you noticed anything off about his breathing?" she demanded.

Natsu blinked at her, taken off guard by the unexpected question. "Uh…" he said stupidly, racking his brain for the correct response.

"Great," the healer growled in exasperation. "Not you too."

"Sorry, I just wasn't expecting the question," he said defensively. He thought back to how Gray's breathing had been so quiet the other night that he couldn't hear it at all unless he concentrated very hard with his superhuman hearing. "He was breathing really quietly?" the dragon slayer offered uncertainly.

Porlyusica fixed him with an unimpressed look. "Would you say that his breathing was like that from the beginning or did it change at some point?"

"Um…" Natsu saw the annoyance flash over the woman's face and he hurried to answer before she snapped at him again. "I don't know. I wasn't paying attention because there were more important things to worry about, but I know that it was really quiet around the time we went to bed last night."

Porlyusica nodded and turned back to Gray, who had watched the exchange without even the faintest trace of interest.

"Is there something wrong with his breathing?" Erza asked, her eyes filled with concern as she glanced between Natsu and Porlyusica.

"He's breathing very shallowly," the healer said shortly. "It could indicate that something is wrong with his lungs, or perhaps it's an indication that he's in pain and is breathing shallowly to minimize his discomfort. Alternatively, the functioning of his internal organs and muscles could be impaired just like his walking and other voluntary movements are."

"That doesn't sound good," Lucy whispered.

Porlyusica sent her a scathing look and the blonde shrank back a little, inching closer to Natsu. The healer turned back to Gray, muttering something about 'stupid humans' under her breath.

"I want you to take a deep breath," she instructed him. "Breathe in deeply."

He blinked at her uncertainly for a moment before glancing back over at Natsu. The dragon slayer frowned a little but made an encouraging hand gesture. Gray looked back at Porlyusica and obediently drew in a deep breath. The response was immediate. An almost pained look flitted across his face as he winced, and then he grimaced and doubled over as he started coughing violently.

There was a flurry of movement as everyone panicked, but when they tried to approach him, Gray shot them a baleful look and edged backward a few steps.

"Stay back," Porlyusica snapped as she studied Gray's reaction carefully.

Everyone reluctantly paused, although they still looked like they wanted to go running to his aid. After a few more seconds of coughing, Gray's fit subsided and he straightened up. Removing his hand from his mouth, he studied the appendage with an almost curious expression. Natsu didn't know what had caught the ice mage's attention at first, so he took a few small steps to the side so that he had a better view. He sucked in a breath as he saw the crimson substance dripping slowly down Gray's fingers.

"No," he breathed, his eyes widening.

This couldn't be happening. They had already done the hard part of finding Gray and bringing him way. There was no way that he had brought Gray back just to watch him die again. Gray looked up at the sound of Natsu's voice and blinked at him in an unconcerned fashion. Natsu wished he could be half as calm.

"He's coughing up blood again?" Cana asked, her voice rising in pitch as panic crept over face.

"Calm down and wait," Porlyusica barked. She had still been watching Gray, but now she looked over at Natsu and began firing off questions in rapid succession. "He hasn't had any seizures since you brought him back?"

"No," Natsu said absently, still in shock.

"Have you noticed any trembling in his hands or any other part of his body?"

"No."

"Has he been experiencing any more temperature fluctuations?"

"I…don't know," Natsu admitted, frowning a little. "I tried not to touch him too much in case he got overwhelmed. But when I was helping him walk around I didn't notice anything strange about his body temperature."

"And this is the first time you've seen him cough up blood?"

"Yes."

"Hm." Porlyusica returned her gaze to Gray and studied him thoughtfully. He remained impassive. "It doesn't seem like he has any of the other symptoms from before. I'd say that you mostly broke the curse's hold on him, but there are probably some lingering side effects. My best guess is that there's still leftover blood in lungs from before, which might be making it difficult for him to breathe. We'll have to make sure he gets it all out soon."

She stepped forward and offered Gray a tissue. "Go ahead and clean off the blood."

He hesitated for a second with that same momentary delay that seemed to precede all of his actions these days, and then slowly wiped at his fingers to clean off the blood. Natsu watched, a cautious sense of hope flaring within him. If Porlyusica thought that these were just temporary effects then maybe Gray would be okay after all.

"So it's nothing to really worry about?" Juvia asked hesitantly.

Porlyusica scowled. "I wouldn't know. He's not giving me a whole lot of information to work with here. It's hard to make a diagnosis when the patient can't even tell me how he's feeling or if he's in any pain."

"Maybe he can't tell you," Meredy said slowly, "but if I put another sensory link on him, you might be able to feel it. Now that his soul is united with his body again, there shouldn't be any danger in using the links."

Natsu brightened up considerably at that suggestion.

"That's a good idea," Wendy agreed. "I think that you should link me to him because it will give me a better feeling of what's wrong with him and maybe help me decide if my magic can help this time. I can relay any important information to Porlyusica-san so that she can give a second opinion, and it will be easier for me to do that since I have a better understanding of possible medical problems than the rest of you do."

No one could find any real reason to deny the request, so Meredy linked her with Gray, although the pink-haired girl still looked a little nervous after what had happened last time. Wendy immediately gasped and sucked in a breath, her eyes widening.

"What's wrong?" Charle asked in concern.

Wendy doubled over, gasping for breath as she waved at her Exceed to give her a minute to collect herself. Everyone watched her with varying levels of worry until she straightened up again. Even though she seemed to have adjusted to whatever she—and Gray—was feeling, there was still a pained look on her face and Natsu could hear her unusually shallow, rapid breaths. Gray didn't display any of the same signs that Wendy was, but he watched her with something approaching interest.

"I take it there's pain then," Porlyusica muttered, nodding to herself.

"Yes," Wendy agreed. "But it's very…generalized. I can't feel pain radiating from a specific source or anything, so I don't know where it's coming from. I'm not sure if there's actually anything  _wrong_. I think it might just be an echo of what he was feeling from before. Maybe the curse isn't completely out of his system yet.

"And you're right about his lungs." She grimaced and took another shallow breath. "No wonder his breathing is off—it feels like I'm drowning. It's really hard to breathe normally. I can't believe he can act like he's not in any pain."

Natsu winced. He didn't want to hear that his friend was hurting. Perhaps Gray didn't see a problem with it because he still didn't know how he  _should_ feel, but Natsu didn't want him to think that this was normal. The dragon slayer didn't know what Gray was feeling from Wendy, but although he didn't say anything, the ice mage was displaying more interest than he had in a long time.

"No major medical problems to report?" Porlyusica asked.

The healer asked Wendy a few more questions, but the ending opinion seemed to be that nothing was physically wrong with Gray, despite the lingering pain and the issue with his lungs. As Meredy removed the link, Natsu noticed that Wendy seemed to shrink into herself, suddenly looking lost and small.

"Wendy?" he asked cautiously. "Are you alright?"

She looked up at him with haunted eyes. "It's a terrible feeling," she whispered. "It's so empty and cold when nothing matters."

Natsu grimaced. Having been linked to Gray once before, he had a pretty good idea of what Wendy was talking about. He had hoped that Gray would start returning to normal already, but he supposed it was still too soon for that. There wasn't any point getting discouraged when Gray had only been back for less than a day.

"I know," he told Wendy quietly. "But we'll get him back."

She took a shuddering breath and nodded. Then a determined look crept into her eyes as she turned back to Gray. "My magic didn't really work against the curse, but maybe I can at least take away some of the pain."

Gray watched her emotionlessly as she approached. He didn't look like he particularly cared one way or the other, but he didn't protest when she put her hand on his arm and began channeling her magic into him. She pulled away several seconds later, a disappointed look flitting across her face.

"I'm not sure it did much," she admitted with a heavy sigh. "I could still feel some of the resistance that I felt when I tried to heal him after he first got hit with Memento Mori. I suppose that would make sense if the pain is still a residual effect of the curse, but it might mean that my magic is going to be entirely useless again." She studied Gray. "Do you feel any different?"

Gray shrugged indifferently, but Natsu thought there was the tiniest spark of warmth in his eyes as he looked at her.

"I don't know. Maybe a little."

Natsu wondered if temporarily feeling her emotions had made Gray soften towards Wendy a little. The fact that he had tagged on a 'maybe a little' to the end of his usual 'I don't know' suggested that he might be trying to soften the blow of her magic's ineffectiveness. Then again, Gray didn't seem too concerned about people's feelings these days, and even if he had felt something towards Wendy, it seemed to be draining away rapidly. Whatever faint emotion had been reflected in his eyes had already disappeared.

"Right. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do then," Porlyusica said bluntly. "But there are a few things we can try. First of all, I'm going to take him to the backroom. I set up all my supplies in there and I'll brew up a few potions that might help with the pain and some other problems he might have. It's always good to have some kind of backup in case of emergencies. I'll also get him to get rid of all that excess blood in his lungs and I'll take another look at his motor functioning. Then we'll talk about where to go from here." She turned away and began walking towards the back of the guild hall. "Come on," she ordered Gray.

The ice mage glanced over at Natsu again. The dragon slayer frowned. He didn't understand why Gray kept looking at him like that, as if he were the authority to listen to.

"Go ahead," he said.

Gray shrugged and trailed after Porlyusica obediently. Natsu watched them go with a slightly puzzled expression, before turning away to answer the barrage of questions from his guildmates. Everyone wanted to know  _everything_ about what had happened with Gray since they had seen him last, and Natsu obliged them with as much patience as he could muster. He answered questions for nearly an hour, until Porlyusica and Gray emerged from the backroom again.

"Well, I made him cough up all the blood he could," Porlyusica said briskly without preamble. "His breathing is a little better, and it should keep improving over time." She turned her sharp gaze on Natsu. "I also fixed him some potions. Now pay attention to what they're all for, because I don't trust him to take them properly."

Natsu didn't know if Porlyusica had noticed how Gray kept looking to him for guidance and that was why she had decided to make him the focus of her attention, but he was forced to spend the next half hour memorizing the uses and dosages and side effects of half a dozen potions. Several other guild members had joined in on the lesson as well, but Porlyusica refused to move on until Natsu could recite everything back to her verbatim. All of the information was making his head hurt, but he knew it was important that they remembered it all, because Gray probably wouldn't take the medicine on his own and had shown no interest in memorizing the directions. So they all studied potions until Porlyusica was satisfied.

"Alright," she said finally. "I'm going home. I'll come back up in…let's say three days. I'll need to give him another checkup to see how he has improved. I expect to see rapid improvement over the first couple weeks or so. After that, we can make his checkups once every week or two. But until then I'll check in on him frequently, not only to monitor his progress, but also because if anything is going to go wrong, it's most likely to go wrong within the next few weeks. This is the critical period—he'll either get a lot better or a lot worse.

"If anything happens—if he starts having seizures or the trembling comes back or he coughs up more blood or anything else—then send for me immediately." She turned to leave, but added one last comment as an afterthought. "If he coughs up a little bit of blood, that's probably okay. There still might be a small amount left in his lungs. But if he coughs up more than a few drops then you should start to worry."

And with that she swept out of the guild hall and was gone. They all stared after her for a few seconds.

"Well, at least it was mostly good news," Happy said finally.

"Yeah," Cana muttered.

Natsu looked back over at Gray, who was sitting at a table watching them impassively. Some of the others followed his gaze, but they hesitated as they decided what to do next. No one seemed to be sure of where to go from here.

"Oh!" Lucy said suddenly. "You gave him his necklace back."

Everyone else peered closer, to see the glint of silver around Gray's neck. The ice mage hadn't tucked the necklace under his shirt like he normally did, back before he had lost all his memories.

Natsu gave Happy a wry look. "Oh yes," he said dryly. "I gave it back to him just as soon as I found it."

"Huh?" Lucy asked in confusion. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I said I was sorry!" Happy wailed.

The necklace suddenly reminded Natsu of something else Happy had said back when the dragon slayer had first found it in the cabinet. He frowned over at the others.

"You contacted Lyon, right?"

A few people exchanged looks.

"Yes," Erza answered, her eyes uncertain. "I'm not sure he's taking it very well. He was very…surprised, to say the least. But he's coming down. He was practically out the door before we even got off the lacrima with him, and I would honestly expect him to get here at any time."

"And he's going to be a pain in the neck to deal with," Gajeel muttered.

"Be nice," Levy admonished. "He was one of the people who was hardest hit by this. It's not surprising that he's so worked up."

Natsu wasn't sure that that sounded like a promising sign, but he settled back to wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no medical experience and did no real research on possible medical conditions for this story. The physical component is minor at best, and not terribly important. Also, Lyon will show up next chapter, so yay for those of you who have been waiting for that.


	11. Ch 10-An overprotective brother arrives

* * *

**Chapter 10**

_(In which an overprotective brother enters the scene and Fairy Tail tries to read Gray's mind.)_

* * *

As it turned out, Erza was right: they didn't have to wait very long for Lyon to show up. It was perhaps an hour or two after Porlyusica left that Lamia Scale's ice mage came bursting through the doors.

"Where is he?" Lyon demanded, his eyes frantically searching the assembled mages.

Everyone had been trying to talk with Gray and remind him of important things from his life from before, but they all fell silent when the doors crashed open and Lyon suddenly appeared. Several of them turned their gazes to Erza, who sighed and stood up.

"Over here, Lyon," she said, nodding towards where Gray was sitting nearby and watching Lyon with a vaguely uncomfortable expression. "Just remember that—"

Uninterested in what else she had to say, Lyon immediately started across the hall, brushing past the other mages as if they weren't even there. He stopped in front of Gray and stared at him for several long seconds, almost looking as if he'd seen a ghost, which perhaps wasn't too far from the truth. Natsu could see why the others had been a little worried about his reaction. Lyon looked terrible. It wasn't even anything about his overt appearance, although everything about him looked strangely disheveled as if he had been in a great hurry, but there was something fragile and feverish flickering in his eyes.

"Gray," the other ice mage breathed, a mixture of shock, disbelief, and apprehension coloring his voice.

Gray didn't respond other than to shift uncomfortably, and the broken look on Lyon's face intensified.

"You guys  _did_  tell him that Gray doesn't remember anything, right?" Natsu whispered to Erza.

The requip mage inched a little closer to him so that they could talk without being overheard. A frown tugged at the corners of her lips as she watched Lyon carefully.

"Yes," she said softly. "That's why we didn't think he would take it well. I think he was still kind of hoping that we were wrong, or that Gray would at least remember him since they had been so close. Even if he knew that Gray didn't remember anything, he would still have hoped that he did."

"So it's true then," Lyon said finally, oblivious the whispered conversation going on several feet away. His shoulders slumped. "You don't remember me."

Gray didn't respond immediately, but then his gaze slid away from Lyon and he crossed his arms over his chest almost defensively. Natsu frowned a little. He hadn't seen Gray look this uncomfortable since Juvia had almost accosted him earlier that morning.

"You were screaming too," Gray said finally.

Lyon blinked in confusion and looked lost. "What in the world is that supposed to mean?" he asked uncertainly.

"Aw hell, we should have seen this coming," Natsu groaned. He glanced back at Erza. "I don't suppose you thought to tell him about the whole almost-memory thing?"

Erza shuffled her feet and looked uncomfortable. "We didn't think to mention it to him the first time we talked. Meredy remembered it after we had already got off the line with him, and we debated whether or not we should try linking back to his lacrima again. We eventually decided not to in case Gray didn't actually recognize Lyon. We thought it would be more devastating if we told Lyon that Gray would recognize him but then he didn't, rather than not telling him about the possibility and having Gray recognize him anyway."

Natsu supposed he could see the sense in that, but he still kind of wanted to whack someone for not warning Lyon. This whole situation was already a big enough shock for the older mage without adding to it.

Meanwhile, Lyon had finally taken notice of Erza and Natsu's conversation. He looked over at them with slightly narrowed eyes. "Will someone please tell me what's going on here?"

Natsu turned to Erza since she was still the de facto leader here, but she took a half-step back and gestured towards Natsu.

"This one's all yours," she said. He glared at her and she assumed an air of innocence. "You're the one who best understands what's going on," she added, by means of explanation.

Natsu sighed and turned back to Lyon, deciding that this was neither the time nor place to argue about this. Not now, with an unstable Lyon demanding an explanation.

"I don't know how much they told you about the void, but I was the one Meredy linked Gray to, so out of all the rest of us, I'm the one who came closest to experiencing it," Natsu said with a sigh. "I'm not even going to try explaining it all, but the key point is that it was basically a place where nothing really existed and it broke Gray down until he forgot about everything that does exist. But it was kind of an incomplete nothingness, probably because of how his devil slayer magic interfered with the curse. So even though he was…kind of…non-existing?..."

He trailed off with a grimace and ran a hand through his hair. He wasn't sure that he was making a lot of sense, but he had no idea how to explain something so complicated and incomprehensible.

"Well, you remember how you could all see the memory of his last days after he…'died'?" the dragon slayer asked, trying a slightly different tack. "And you know how he was reliving his 'death' from when the dragonlings shot him? Well, in the void he was still vaguely aware of that memory, playing over and over again in a loop. So when he says that you were screaming…" He shrugged.

A light of realization dawned in Lyon's eyes as he looked back at Gray with a new understanding. Meredy walked over from where she had been sitting with Jellal a few tables away. A slight motion caught Natsu's attention, and he noticed that Gray's unwavering focus had shifted to Meredy as she approached and he had subtly shifted away from her. The movement was so slight that the dragon slayer wasn't sure anyone else had noticed it, but it made him frown in bewilderment. Gray didn't usually move without reason.

"He kind of recognized me that way too, when he first woke up," Meredy told Lyon reassuringly, not appearing to notice Gray's reaction to her appearance. "And Juvia too."

That didn't seem to make Lyon any happier, but he at least attempted to smile as he looked between Gray and the other assembled mages.

"Well, I think you all owe me some explanations about what's been going on these past few weeks," he said, letting the strained smile die.

That's how the Fairy Tail mages found themselves answering an unceasing stream of questions for the next half hour. Lyon had questions over everything, from how they had come to the conclusion that Gray wasn't dead to what methods they had used to try finding him to how they were planning to bring his memory back. And then came the question they had all been dreading from the beginning.

"Why am I only hearing about all of this now, if you've been working on it for weeks?"

No one particularly wanted to take the fall for that, so there was an awkward silence for several long seconds before Erza stepped in and tried to rescue the situation.

"You were…really…um, torn up over Gray's 'death' last time," she said carefully, trying to find the most delicate way possible to phrase everything. "And we didn't want to get your hopes up if things didn't work out."

Lyon's eyes flashed angrily. "You think I wouldn't have wanted to know about the possibility right away?" he ground out, his voice tight with fury.

"Of course you would have," Erza agreed, making a placating gesture with her hands that only seemed to make Lyon angrier. "But imagine if we had been wrong and Gray couldn't have been saved. You would have been devastated again."

"Maybe I'm not as goddamn fragile as you think I am," Lyon hissed. "You all would have been devastated too, but you still got to hear about the possibility and get the chance to try to save Gray. You really think that I wouldn't have wanted to help try to save him too? Maybe you don't realize this, but Gray was pretty damn important to me, and the possibility that he could be saved most definitely concerned me. I should have been included in this right from the very beginning. What if I had insights into the problem that you hadn't considered? I could have helped you."

"Yes, we would have been devastated too," Erza conceded. "But when Natsu came up with this scheme of his he told us all, so we didn't have the option to remain ignorant of the issue at hand. We  _had_ to be involved, but we thought it would be easier for you if you weren't." She fixed him with a piercing gaze. "And  _do_ you? Have any spectacular insights that could have solved the problem?"

Lyon scowled. "…No," he admitted reluctantly. "But if you had given me the opportunity to actually understand the problem and think through it, I might have come up with something." He glared at her reproachfully. "But you never gave me that opportunity. I should have at least had the  _opportunity_ to help."

Erza sighed and a weary look spread across her face. "You're right. We should have given you a chance," she said quietly. "But you have to understand that finding and rescuing Gray was a long shot from the beginning. We weren't sure we'd be able to do it, and frankly, the odds weren't in our favor. The chances of you being devastated over getting false hope and then having it crushed were much better than the chances of getting a favorable outcome. We wanted to spare you that pain, Lyon. Maybe we should have told you what was going on, but we had your best interests at heart."

Lyon didn't answer immediately. Some of his anger seemed to drain away, but he was still clearly unhappy with the situation. The burning hostility faded a little, but only into a colder, more controlled displeasure. He met Erza's eyes steadily.

"I can understand why you didn't want to tell me. And really, I appreciate the effort to stop me from getting hurt even more. But tell me, if I was the one who had come up with this crazy plan and I hadn't told my theory to any of you until  _after_  I had managed to find and rescue Gray weeks later, all by myself, how would you feel?"

Erza winced and looked away, unable to meet his gaze any longer. Natsu found his gaze wandering off to the side too. He knew what Erza was thinking. They would have been pretty damn angry if someone had come up with a plan to save Gray and hadn't even bothered telling them about it for weeks. Despite the guild's reluctance to believe Natsu when he first started spouting wild theories, it had rallied as soon as there was tangible evidence that something was going on with Gray and that there was the slightest possibility that he might be saved. Perhaps that was the point at which they should have contacted Lyon.

Because once thoughts of saving Gray had moved past denial-induced dreaming and into real possibilities…They would have wanted to be able to help save Gray in any way they could, and being denied that opportunity would have made them angry and hurt. He rather thought that they would feel pretty betrayed that someone they had considered to be something of a friend had hidden such important information from them, and he was getting the feeling that the reason Lyon was so angry now was because he was feeling betrayed, as well as excluded. To be honest, if Natsu had to do it all over again, he thought that he'd still prefer to keep Lyon out of the loop until Gray was back because he wasn't sure the older mage could have handled a failure if it had happened, but he understood why Lyon was upset.

"You're right," Erza said again, her voice low. "And we're sorry. We should have told you."

Lyon nodded and blew out a harsh breath. "Yeah, you should have," he agreed bluntly. "But if nothing else, I can appreciate the good intentions. And…I have to thank you too." He looked away and fixed his eyes on the floor as they all returned their gazes to him. "Thank you for finding Gray and bringing him back."

Natsu exhaled softly. Lyon was obviously still feeling a little betrayed, but he was also calming down now. Perhaps there was still hope for the relations between him and the guild, which was a good thing since Natsu suspected that they would be working together closely during Gray's rehabilitation process.

Now that the main problem at hand seemed to be at least temporarily solved, Natsu was eager to change the subject and put it behind them for now.

"You did bring the key to Gray's apartment, right?" he asked cheerfully. "Because my house is really too messy for guests right now."

Everyone turned to fix him with disbelieving looks. Erza rolled her eyes and rubbed at her face in exasperation, and Lyon looked at him as if he had grown a second head. Natsu resisted the urge to grin at their expressions. They probably thought he was misreading the mood because he had a reputation for being a little slow and unobservant, and he didn't mind that perception. He didn't care if they thought he was crazy or stupid, as long as he could lighten the mood and get everyone to move past this argument and on to more important things.

Lyon opened his mouth, likely to ask Natsu what the hell he thought he was doing, but Sting hurried to speak first. Perhaps living with Natsu for a few days and seeing how he dealt with awkward situations had let the Sabertooth mages realize what the other dragon slayer was trying to do. In any case, Natsu appreciated his help.

"What about me and Rogue?" Sting demanded, glancing sidelong at Lyon to monitor the other mage's expression and reactions. "You didn't worry about how messy your house was when you invited  _us_ over."

"Well, you clearly don't count," Natsu answered dismissively, inclining his head towards Sting in an almost imperceptible gesture of gratitude. Sting nodded slightly in return.

"And why not?" Rogue asked. "I mean, I understand why you would exclude Sting since he's hardly civilized, but I resent being lumped in with him."

"Hey!" Sting spluttered, giving his friend a hurt look. "That's mean."

Rogue maintained his unimpressed expression. "With how much you eat and talk, and how insensitive you are to signals that people want you to shut up, you can hardly expect us to call you civilized."

"Ouch," Sting said, assuming an air of injured innocence. "That hurts."

Lyon looked back and forth between the two Sabertooth mages while they talked, before finally giving in and sighing.

"Alright, alright," he interrupted, obviously ready to put an end to the bickering. "I have the key."

Natsu hid a triumphant grin. "Fantastic. Gray always kept his place cleaner than I keep mine."

He looked over to where the ice mage had been sitting, and was surprised to see that he was gone. Looking around, he saw that Gray had apparently inched his way down the bench while they were distracted by the conversation, and he had ended up at a spot closer to Natsu and further from Lyon. That behavior puzzled the dragon slayer, because Gray was usually inclined to sit still and not move until someone forced him to.

"Why don't we take Gray over to his place now so that he can have a look around?" Lyon suggested. "Maybe it'll help trigger his memory."

He returned his gaze to Gray as well, doing a double take when he realized that the other mage was no longer there. Looking around, he quickly spotted Gray some distance away and a hurt look flickered across his face as he realized that his friend had moved away from him.

Natsu hurried to distract him. "Sounds like a good idea," he said hastily. "Don't bring too many people with you though. Gray's been stuck with all of us for hours, and he could probably use a break."

Lyon nodded slowly, his gaze still fixed on Gray. "Do you want to come with me to see your apartment?" he asked his adoptive brother hesitantly.

Gray glanced over at Natsu again, who nodded encouragingly. There was a long pause before Gray nodded slowly to Lyon, but the air of wariness surrounding him didn't dissipate. Natsu had originally intended to let Lyon take Gray alone, but with how uncomfortable Gray was acting around him, he thought that might be a bad idea.

"Great!" the dragon slayer chirped enthusiastically. "Happy and I will come with you!"

"We will?" Happy asked in surprise.

Lyon scowled over at the dragon slayer, clearly displeased with this intrusion. Natsu didn't want to admit the real reason he felt compelled to go, so he invented another plausible explanation to forestall Lyon's angry protestations.

"Sure we are," he answered Happy, not taking his gaze off Lyon. "I'm the one who best understands what's going on with him right now. There are things he'll do or say or won't understand that will end up confusing someone who hasn't had to deal with it before. I'm sure Lyon could use an interpreter until he starts figuring out how Gray's mind works. Plus, I might as well drop off all those potions Porlyusica left."

He and Lyon stared at each other heatedly for a few more seconds before the ice mage sighed and looked away.

"Fine," he growled.

"Fantastic," Natsu said, relieved that Lyon wasn't going to put up too much of a fight. "Come on, Happy." He glanced back at Erza and the others. "Unless plans change, I think we should be back here in an hour or two. We'll just show Gray around his place and then come back."

"Alright, good luck," Erza replied, shooting him a look that clearly said  _'don't you even think about antagonizing Lyon any more or you'll have to answer to me when you get back'_.

Natsu resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Annoying Lyon had never been his goal, and he had no intention of starting a fight with the other mage, no matter how irritating he could be. No, Natsu didn't want to hurt Lyon, but taking care of Gray was his top priority right now and that came first.

He looked over at Gray and tilted his head towards the doorway. His friend hesitated a moment before he slowly rose from his seat and made his way towards the door on unsteady legs. Natsu dumped all of Porlyusica's potions in a handy bag that Wendy silently offered him. Then he and Lyon said their goodbyes to the others and followed after Gray, Happy trailing behind them.

The walk to Gray's apartment was tense and awkward, with Lyon attempting to talk to Gray and Gray doing his best not to answer or to at least give only terse, monosyllabic responses. That wasn't all that unusual in and of itself, but something about the way Gray was acting towards Lyon was bothering Natsu. Although Happy occasionally tried to insert a comment to break some of the tension, Natsu stayed quiet and observed the two ice mages.

They were already standing outside the apartment building before Natsu paused in the doorway and finally spoke.

"Lyon…Showing Gray his old home is a good idea, but don't get your hopes up." He met Lyon's eyes squarely. He didn't want to discourage the other mage, but he also wanted Lyon to know exactly what he was walking into this time. "We already gave him his necklace back, and it didn't get so much as a spark of recognition out of him, much less a memory. He's been in and out of my house and the guild hall, he's walked the streets of Magnolia, and he's spent time with all of his old friends in the guild. And not once has he ever recognized anything."

"What are you trying to say?" Lyon asked harshly, his eyes flashing.

Natsu just looked at him sadly and didn't take offense at the belligerent tone. He could understand Lyon's helpless fury, and he knew that the other mage already understood what Natsu was telling him, even if he didn't want to admit it to himself.

"We'll make him remember eventually, but don't be too disappointed if it doesn't happen today," the dragon slayer said quietly.

Lyon bit his lip and looked away, nodding once to show that he had taken the point. Natsu stepped aside to let him unlock the apartment. Gray watched their interaction dispassionately, but although he was uninterested in the proceedings, he obediently followed Natsu into the apartment after Lyon worked the door open.

"Well, here it is," Natsu said cheerfully, stretching his arms out in a sweeping gesture to encompass the room. "Home sweet home."

Something like disagreement flashed in Gray's eyes and Natsu thought it might be in response to the mention of a 'home', but the ice mage didn't vocalize his protest. Lyon watched his adoptive brother anxiously, his face a mix of fragile hope and something approaching pained acceptance.

"Take a look around," he suggested. He paused. "Or here, I'll give you the tour."

Natsu fell back with Happy as Lyon pointed out different things in the apartment. Gray obediently followed the other ice mage and gave a cursory glance at all the things Lyon mentioned, but maintained a slight distance and didn't seem to be paying much attention. Then he suddenly paused by a table in the living room and picked up a picture frame. Natsu glanced at Happy, who shrugged. The duo inched forward to take a look at what had caught Gray's interest. The frame held a painting of what appeared to be a small Gray and Lyon, along with an older woman.

Noticing that Gray was no longer following him, Lyon stopped and turned. Retracing his steps, he stood beside Gray so that he could look at the portrait as well. Gray tapped his finger thoughtfully on the glass over Lyon's face and then looked over at the other ice mage and arched an eyebrow in an unspoken question.

Lyon smiled wistfully. "Yeah," he said quietly. "That's me as a kid."

Gray nodded, apparently satisfied, and made to replace the frame on the tabletop. Lyon reached out to stop him, and the younger mage jerked his hand away from the contact and gave Lyon a wary but questioning look.

"Do you recognize the other person?" Lyon asked hopefully, once he had regained his composure after his automatic wince at Gray's reaction.

Gray blinked at him blankly for a moment before looking back down at the picture again. He didn't respond for a moment. Natsu expected him to give his usual answer of 'I don't know', but his actual response was more surprising and unsettling.

"Which one?" Gray asked finally.

Lyon stared at him uneasily. "What do you mean, which one?"

"There are two other people here," Gray said matter-of-factly. Then he shrugged dismissively. "I suppose it doesn't matter. The answer to your question is 'no'. I don't recognize them."

Natsu felt his face contort in an almost nauseous expression. Beside him, Happy sucked in a breath, and Lyon didn't fare much better, his face slack with shock and horror. The other ice mage reached out and pointed at Gray's face in the picture with a trembling finger.

"That's…That's  _you_ , Gray," he said, his voice wavering dangerously.

Gray blinked down at the picture for a moment longer, but Lyon's assertion didn't seem to trigger any kind of real response.

"Hm," he hummed noncommittally, depositing the frame back on the table.

"There's a mirror in the bathroom," Happy said hesitantly, finally breaking the stunned silence. Everyone turned to look at him, and he fluttered his wings self-consciously. "I mean, he still doesn't remember anything and he's still half-convinced that he doesn't really exist, right? Of course he doesn't remember what he looks like."

Natsu nodded slowly, seeing the sense in Happy's suggestion. He really should have seen this coming. If Gray hadn't even known his own name, then why would he remember his appearance? Lyon evidently agreed, because without thinking, he grabbed Gray's arm and started tugging him towards the bathroom. Gray's reaction was immediate. The younger ice mage instinctively flinched back and twisted away from Lyon. Once he was free, he retreated several steps and watched the older mage with wary eyes.

Lyon stared at him in surprise and then a hurt look settled over his features. Natsu was rather shocked himself, because Gray rarely seemed overly bothered by much these days, and he almost never made sudden movements. Considering his usual apathy and slow, reluctant movements, this was highly unusual behavior.

"You have to be careful," Natsu said hurriedly, racking his brain for a way to salvage the situation without hurting Lyon's feelings any more. "He, uh, doesn't always like to be touched. And he doesn't always do well with sudden movements."

That was a half-truth at best. Gray didn't actually seek out physical contact, but he hadn't had a problem with Natsu or Happy, or even Sting and Rogue, touching him in order to help him move about when he lost his balance or needed assistance. And although sudden movements usually caught his attention, he rarely reacted physically. Well, he had when Juvia had come running at him earlier this morning, but Natsu had no idea why Gray was so skittish around Lyon when he didn't behave this way with the others.

Lyon still looked upset, but he seemed to accept the explanation. Nodding slowly, he averted his gaze. "Come with me?" he asked Gray tentatively.

Gray regarded him cautiously for a moment more before glancing over at Natsu again. The dragon slayer frowned a little. He really needed to ask Gray why he kept looking to him for everything, but he'd rather wait until Lyon wasn't around. The older ice mage was already hurt enough.

"Let's go," Natsu encouraged.

Gray nodded and slowly walked towards Lyon, who breathed a sigh of relief and led him into the bathroom. Natsu dropped the bag of potions on the table beside the picture frame and followed, glancing over at the Exceed flying beside him. Happy met his gaze and shrugged helplessly, looking just as bewildered as Natsu felt.

"That's you," Lyon told Gray quietly, pointing at the mirror as the four of them crowded into the bathroom. "It's your reflection."

"Hm."

Gray didn't appear overly interested at first, but when he realized that the figure in the mirror moved in response to his own gestures, he displayed an almost rapt attention. He slowly moved his arms and head about, carefully studying the resulting actions in the mirror. Inching closer to the reflective surface, he became absorbed in his changing facial expressions and hand gestures.

While Gray was otherwise occupied, Lyon edged over to Natsu. His gaze was still fixed on Gray, but he spoke to the dragon slayer in a low voice.

"He's acting really strangely towards me, isn't he?" he whispered, keeping his voice quiet enough that Gray wouldn't hear.

"Well…He's acting really strangely towards everyone right now," Natsu hedged, not wanting Lyon to realize exactly how much worse Gray handled him than everyone else.

Lyon tore his gaze away from Gray and fixed Natsu with a piercing look. "I might not have been around him as much as you all have, but even I can see the differences. He really isn't this skittish and wary around the rest of you, is he?"

Natsu looked to Happy for help, but the little cat just shrugged sadly. The dragon slayer let out a breath. If Lyon had already noticed the issue then there was no point in trying to hide it.

"Yeah, he treats you differently. I really don't know why though," he admitted softly. "I'm sorry."

Lyon's eyes clouded with pain, but he just shrugged and looked away. "Nothing to apologize for," he muttered, gazing at Gray wistfully. "It's not your fault."

"We'll get him back," Natsu said, his heart twisting painfully at the heartbroken look on Lyon's face.

"Yeah. Okay."

Trying to break the somber mood, Natsu tried a different tactic. "So, who  _was_ the other person in the picture?" he asked.

Lyon threw him a faintly disbelieving look before his eyes wandered away again. "Didn't you guess?" he asked quietly, sadness tinging his voice. "That was Ur."

Natsu swallowed hard, a sick feeling settling in his stomach. Apparently he had only managed to make things worse. He really had no idea how to recover from such a blunder, but it was at that moment that Gray apparently lost interest in his reflection and turned back to them, so they didn't have any more opportunity to speak anyway. Gray studied them with blank eyes.

"Maybe it's time to go back to the guild?" Happy suggested after a few seconds of awkward silence.

Natsu looked over at Lyon, content to let the other mage make this decision. Lyon seemed torn, likely because he wanted to stay here and continue trying to jog Gray's memory, but also knew that it wasn't working and realized that Gray wasn't comfortable with him.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Let's go back."

They walked back to the guild in tense silence. Judging by the distant look on Lyon's face, he was trying to figure out why Gray was so uncomfortable around him. Natsu had originally planned to start up a conversation so that the walk back wasn't as awkward as the walk to the apartment, but he decided to leave Lyon to his thoughts.

A set of expectant faces greeted them as they entered the guild hall, but something in their expressions must have told the other members what had happened. The hopeful looks faded away.

"Nothing?" Lucy asked.

"Nope," Natsu replied. The glum expressions on everyone's faces made him uncomfortable, so he forged on with forced cheerfulness. "I don't know about everyone else, but I'm starving. Might as well eat an early dinner. Hey, Mira! Can you grab me something to eat? Just whatever the special is today. And get one for Gray too, will you?" He glanced back and Happy and Lyon. "Either of you hungry?"

Lyon shook his head absently, still lost in his own disheartening thoughts, but Happy perked up at the mention of food.

"Aye sir!"

"Get something for Happy too, please!" Natsu called towards Mira.

"Of course," Mira agreed with a gentle smile. "Does anyone else want anything?"

Several other mages placed their orders, and Mira disappeared into the back to get their food. Natsu dragged Gray and Lyon over to sit at a table with Erza and Lucy, Happy trailing after them. Lucy, Natsu, and Happy determinedly started up a lighthearted conversation about everything not pertaining to Gray as they waited for their meal. Erza and Lyon didn't offer much as they both seemed distracted and melancholy, and Gray said nothing, as usual. Luckily Mira worked quickly, and Natsu eagerly grabbed at the chance to distract himself with eating the food she brought out.

The chicken and assorted sides looked delicious and Natsu was about to dig in when he looked over at Gray and resisted the urge to groan.

"Oh man, I forgot to ask her to get Gray something he could eat with his hands," he said with a sigh.

"Well, he'll have to learn how to use utensils sometime," Happy said, trying to look on the bright side.

"What do you mean?" Lyon asked sharply, finally taking an interest in their conversation. He studied Gray's stoic face critically, trying to discern what the problem was.

"You saw how bad his motor skills are right now," Natsu answered mildly, sawing at his chicken with his knife so that he didn't have to look at the other mage. "Manipulating small objects like forks isn't very easy for him yet."

"Natsu just made him a sandwich last night," Happy cut in, as if seeking to reassure Lyon.

Natsu was so busy not looking at Lyon as he played with his food, that he didn't realize Gray hadn't started eating until Lucy spoke up.

"Are you not hungry, Gray?"

Natsu looked up and grimaced slightly as he noticed that Gray was staring blankly at his plate and not moving. His only response to Lucy's probing question was to shrug apathetically. Natsu let out a breath.

"Not this again," he muttered. "Eat your food, Gray."

The ice mage hesitated a moment longer before sighing and beginning the struggle to hold his fork properly.

"Maybe he's just not hungry?" Lucy suggested as they all watched Gray fumble about with the utensil.

Natsu shrugged. "Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. He doesn't know the difference so he can't tell us. But he hasn't eaten since this morning and I'd rather him be a little overfed than starve."

Everyone looked unsettled by that, but they let the matter drop. By the time they had finished their meal, Gray had finally started getting the hang of the fork. He still moved slowly and clumsily, but he ate a small portion of his food before dropping his fork and resuming his apathetic survey of his plate.

"Eat your food," Natsu ordered wearily.

Gray grimaced faintly but picked up the fork with palpable reluctance.

"Maybe he isn't hungry anymore," Lyon said, watching the other ice mage carefully.

"Or maybe it's just because he doesn't particularly like to eat," Natsu countered, his voice edged with irritation. It had been a long day.

"Why wouldn't he like to eat?" Erza asked suspiciously.

"Because he doesn't care enough to take care of himself and because he doesn't want to exist so he doesn't think he should have to eat," Natsu answered, fighting to keep the waspishness out of his voice. It wasn't fair to take out his frustrations on the others when they hadn't done anything wrong.

"That's terrible," Lucy whispered after a brief pause.

They watched Gray in silence for a few more seconds.

"You know," Erza said slowly, "it might be better not to make him eat so much yet."

"Why?" Happy asked. Natsu arched a questioning eyebrow as well.

"Well…You know how if you haven't eaten in a very long time then you have to start off eating small amounts and then work your way back up to eating normal quantities until your body adjusts again?" Erza asked. "Gray's body has been in stasis for over a year and a half. Porlyusica mentioned that his internal organs might take some time to return to their normal state of functioning. I don't know if his body is affected by this or not, but technically Gray hasn't eaten in over a year and a half. Maybe it would be better to only feed him small portions for a while."

Natsu considered that. He could see the sense in what she was saying, but he wasn't sure if he agreed or not. He looked at Happy to seek the feline's opinion.

"Makes sense," the Exceed said in reply to Natsu's silent query.

"I think Erza's probably right," Lucy agreed.

Even Lyon nodded slowly, so Natsu sighed and relented. "Alright, alright, you don't have to eat any more if you don't want to," he told Gray.

The ice mage immediately dropped his fork and watched them with those unsettlingly dead eyes. Lucy shivered involuntarily.

"It's so weird," she murmured. "I have no idea what's going through his head. I mean, he barely talks anymore, he can't answer most of our questions, and I can't even begin to understand the motives behind his behavior. I don't understand him at all anymore. How are we supposed to help him if we can't understand him?"

Natsu grimaced and looked away. Out of all of them, he probably had the best understanding of what was going on in Gray's head, but that really wasn't saying much. He had only been linked to Gray in the void for a short time, and he couldn't even begin to comprehend what his friend had gone through or what he was thinking.

"And it's not like we can just keep a sensory link on him 24/7," Erza added with a sigh.

"Why not?" Lyon demanded.

"Because for one, it would be exhausting and draining for whoever is linked to him. Two, it would require Meredy to keep up a constant stream of magic. And three, I'm sure it would overwhelm Gray and make him shut down," Natsu answered shortly.

"But surely there must be some way we could figure out some of what he's thinking," Lucy protested, her voice taking on a pleading edge.

"You could ask Gemini again."

Natsu jumped in his seat and cursed, twisting around to see that Loke had materialized on the bench beside him.

"You have  _got_ to stop doing that," he snapped, his sudden surprise temporarily sharpening his tone. "You keep popping up out of nowhere and scaring me half to death."

Loke threw him a faintly amused look before his smirk faded as he studied Gray with a melancholy expression. "Sorry, Natsu," he said unapologetically.

Natsu was about to tell Loke what exactly he could do with his insincere apology, but Lucy hurriedly intervened.

"What are you suggesting, exactly?" she asked the spirit.

Loke pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose and turned his gaze to his master. "Gemini can transform into someone else and get information from them. They couldn't do anything before because Gray's soul was gone, but they should be able to use their powers properly now," he explained. "It could give you a little bit of insight into what's going on with Gray."

Everyone agreed that that was an exceptionally good idea, so Lucy wasted no time in summoning Gemini and explaining what she wanted them to do. In short order, there was a second Gray standing beside the first. The sudden appearance of a Gray 'clone' immediately caught everyone else's attention as well, so the other guild members gathered around Team Natsu's table to watch the proceedings with no little curiosity. The only person who seemed completely unfazed was Gray himself, who watched Gemini with an air of indifference.

"So, anything useful we should know?" Lucy pressed, leaning forward in her impatience and excitement.

"It's very…strange," the pseudo-Gray said slowly.

Natsu held back another grimace. It was weird enough having one unnatural Gray around. He had the sudden urge to tear into the spirit for daring to wear his best friend's face, but dug his fingernails into his palms to resist the impulsive action. Gemini was, after all, trying to help them. Natsu might not like that they had to assume his friend's appearance, but he understood why it was necessary.

"How so?" Cana asked impatiently.

"Everything is…different," Gemini replied, still searching for the right words. "There's very little emotion, very little specific knowledge, and the knowledge he does have is very…fragmented and organized oddly."

"Can you tell me why he feels so uncomfortable around me?" Lyon asked, his tone a mixture of desperation to know the answer and fear of what he might hear.

Gemini looked at him and frowned. "There are no names," they mused. "He has some opinions of some of you, but there are no names. Let us search for you."

Natsu and Happy exchanged a look as Gemini stared at Lyon and seemed to dig through Gray's memory. After a moment, the spirits apparently found what they were looking for.

"He has very little interest in most people," they said. "But the screamers make him uncomfortable. The other one he cares about is the voice. He listens to the voice, and it's the closest thing he has to trust."

There was a momentary pause as everyone digested that and picked apart the odd epithets. Gray's eyes narrowed in sudden interest as he studied Gemini curiously.

"The 'screamers'…That must Lyon, Juvia, and Meredy, right?" Erza ventured finally.

"But he wasn't acting weird around me," Meredy protested. "Well, not any weirder than he acts towards the rest of you."

"I'm so stupid," Natsu groaned, resisting the urge to slam his head into a wall. How could he have been so blind as to miss the connections? "He  _has_ been acting differently towards you, Meredy. I noticed that earlier today that when you walked over to him in order to talk to Lyon, he moved away from you. And you all saw how he reacted to Juvia this morning when she tried to greet him. And then there's how he's been acting towards Lyon. I can't believe I didn't make the connection between the three of you."

Meredy's face drained of blood and her mouth twisted into a horrified 'o'. Jellal moved up behind her to comfort her, but she barely paid him any mind. Lyon didn't look much better either, and Juvia's eyes had filled with tears.

"But why?" Juvia wailed. "Juvia didn't do anything bad to Gray-sama!"

The people Gemini hadn't called out watched in bewildered sympathy as they tried to figure out the answer to Juvia's question.

"It must be strange for him to have been dragged into this world and then see you," Erza said finally, her voice quiet and subdued. "He apparently had some awareness of you three through the memory cycle in the void, and it would have been really disorienting for him to run into you out here."

Natsu nodded slowly. "He had a hard enough time accepting that any of us were real to begin with. He didn't believe you three existed in the first place, even in the void. It would have been almost like if you had had an imaginary friend and then one day it suddenly popped into existence."

Juvia and Meredy clung to each other, not looking comforted by the explanation. Lyon had clenched his hands into helpless fists and was staring blankly at the table in front of him. Natsu bit his lip.

"But it can't be all bad," Wendy said after a moment, looking for any reason to stay positive. "If that's the only reason that he's so uncomfortable then I bet he'll start warming up to you as he spends time with you and gets used to us all."

They didn't appear reassured.

"Well, the 'voice' must be Natsu, right?" Lisanna interrupted, trying to change the subject. "Because he was the one who found Gray in the void?"

Natsu nodded slowly, remembering Gray's initial response to him upon awakening for the first time yesterday. When Natsu had asked Gray if he remembered who he was, the ice mage had replied that Natsu was 'the voice'.

"Gray  _has_ been following Natsu around," Erza remarked, studying the dragon slayer thoughtfully. "He looks to you for guidance," she said to him. "And he does what you ask him to. He responds more to you than he does to us."

"Yeah, I was getting that feeling," Natsu answered, recalling how Gray always seemed to be looking to him for guidance or instructions. "I think I might be the most real thing to him right now because he was sense-linked to me and because I was the one who pulled him out of the void. I think it's different than it is with Lyon and the others because Gray kind of knew about them for a long time, but he didn't think they were real. He was at least able to tell that there was something different about me when we talked, and since we talked both inside and outside the void, I think that he might see me as a connection between the two."

"Makes sense," Lucy agreed.

"And he really doesn't distinguish between the rest of us?" Erza asked Gemini, her voice wavering slightly.

The spirits hesitated before responding.

"Not by name," they said finally. "But then again, he doesn't distinguish the screamers or the voice or himself by name either. It's true that he isn't as interested in the rest of you, but he  _is_ starting to pick up on the individual differences. Maybe give him some time?"

As the others continued asking Gemini questions, Natsu finally looked back over at Gray. They had been so distracted talking about Gray that they had pretty much forgotten about the man himself. Now Natsu was paying attention to his friend again, and he didn't like what he saw. Gray's earlier interest in Gemini had disappeared entirely, and the blank look on his face wasn't the normal apathy Natsu had gotten used to. It was even more empty and distant, if that was possible. It was reminding Natsu of something, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Then it suddenly came to him, and he cursed loudly as he stood up from the table and lunged for his friend.

"Wake up  _this instant_ , Gray Fullbuster! I worked too damn hard to rescue you for you to give up on me now!" he shouted, shaking Gray's unresponsive form. The ice mage's expression remained blank and his body flopped lifelessly in Natsu's grip.

Natsu's sudden actions startled everyone, and when they saw the state Gray was in they started to panic.

"What's going on?" Lucy asked shrilly, her voice trembling and rising in pitch.

"He's drifting," Natsu spat, giving Gray another sharp shake. "He's fucking drifting."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Lyon demanded as he stared at Gray anxiously.

"I don't even know how to explain it," Natsu answered, only half paying attention. He let out a shuddering sigh of relief as Gray seemed to start rousing himself. The ice mage wasn't fully conscious yet, but his eyes were starting to regain a little life. "It's a void thing. This is what he was doing when he tried to get me to leave him alone. This is his way of disappearing, when he's trying to lose himself. It's what he does when he doesn't want to exist and he wants to get away from any sign that there's something real out there."

"Shit," Loke rasped. "What happened?"

"My guess is that he got overwhelmed," Natsu replied, still focused on Gray. "Maybe it was how we were all talking at once or maybe it was Gemini or maybe it's just that it's been a damn long day. Or maybe he just decided that he was tired and didn't want to deal with reality anymore."

Gray blinked up at Natsu slowly, taking in his panicked expression. "What?" he asked emotionlessly.

Natsu let out a shaky laugh as he released Gray and dropped back onto the bench, his knees weak with relief. "Don't fucking do that," he answered.

Gray just stared at him for a few more seconds before shrugging apathetically, apparently not seeing what all the fuss was about.

"Could we actually lose him again like that?" Erza whispered. Her eyes were too big in her ashen face as she watched Gray fearfully.

"I don't know," Natsu said, clasping his trembling hands together. "I don't know."

"Are you okay, Gray?" Lyon asked, forgetting Gemini's warning and leaning towards his brother.

Gray's eyes widened slightly and he gingerly slid a little ways down the bench, eyeing Lyon guardedly. The other ice mage halted his approach, a broken expression settling over his features.

"Yes," Gray said flatly.

"What do we do now?" Happy asked, fluttering his wings nervously as he hovered in the air beside Natsu.

The dragon slayer thought through their options.

"Maybe we should leave him alone for a few minutes. If he got overwhelmed then maybe he could use a little time to himself," he suggested finally. "He's been around us all for a long time today and there's been a lot of excitement."

"Is it really a good idea to leave him alone right now?" Erza objected. "What if he does that again?"

"I don't know, Erza," Natsu hissed in frustration. "But what else can we do? We can't watch him every moment of the day. I'm not going to sit by his bed and watch him sleep all night. If he wants to drift then he'll find opportunities to drift. Our best bet right now is to make him comfortable enough that he doesn't feel the need to drift in the first place."

Erza didn't say anything for a moment, but then she nodded reluctantly. "Okay," she said softly. "Do what you think is best."

Natsu nodded and turned to Gray. He felt almost as if he was trying to soothe an injured animal, but he guessed that was a ridiculous comparison given how emotionless and unafraid Gray currently looked.

"Would you like us to leave you alone for a little while?" he asked carefully.

Gray stared at him blankly, but then nodded slowly.

"Okay, we're going to leave you alone, but don't drift, okay?"

Gray nodded again. Natsu stood up and was about to turn to the others to ask where they thought they should let Gray stay, when the ice mage reached out and tugged at the dragon slayer's sleeve.

"Stay," he said.

Natsu looked down at him in surprise, and then fought back sudden tears. It reminded him too much of how Gray had told him to go, after they had defeated Mard Geer. Gray had told him to go so Natsu had left. God, why couldn't Gray have just asked him to stay back then too? Natsu knew it was a stupid thought, because even if he had stayed, he wouldn't have been able to save Gray. And yet the guilt of leaving still haunted him anyway.

"Yeah," he said thickly. "Okay."

Gray dropped his hand, his features still expressionless. Natsu wasn't sure why exactly the ice mage wanted him to stay or what, if anything, he was feeling at the moment, but now wasn't the time to pry. He turned back to the others. Erza was given him a sad but knowing look, as if she knew what was going through his head and why he had suddenly gotten so choked up. It made him uncomfortable, so he cleared his throat and addressed everyone.

"Alright, it's getting late, so I'm just going to take Gray back to his apartment," he decided. "I'll stay the night with him."

"What if—" Lyon started belligerently, but Natsu cut him off firmly. He knew that the other ice mage would want to stay with Gray since he occupied the role of overprotective older brother to him, but that wasn't really an option right now.

"We can reevaluate living arrangements later," the dragon slayer said. He fixed Lyon with a sympathetic but unyielding look. "I know you want to stay with him and do everything you can to help him, but you need to just wait and give him some time. You know that he's uncomfortable around you now. Do you really think it's a good idea for you to be living with him at the moment? We'll come back to the guild in the morning, and you're welcome to speak with him then. He'll get used to you in the coming days and then maybe you can stay with him instead of me. And he doesn't remember how to use his magic, so you can work with him on that too. It'll be a great bonding experience and everything. Just don't push it tonight."

Lyon still looked mutinous, but he nodded reluctantly and unenthusiastically dug the key to Gray's apartment out of his jacket pocked to hand to Natsu.

"Fine."

"In the meantime," Natsu continued, softening his voice with an effort, "you're welcome to stay at my house with Sting, Rogue, and Happy. Happy can fix up the master bedroom for you."

"Aren't I coming with you?" Happy protested, wringing his paws. Natsu shook his head.

"No, you're going to go back to the house with Lyon, Sting, and Rogue."

"Is it because you're still mad about the necklace?" Happy wailed. "I said I was sorry!"

Natsu offered him a smile, although it was a little strained. "No, Happy, it's not because of the necklace. But it's terribly impolite to leave guests in your house without a host. Besides, they'll starve without you around to find everything for them in the cabinets. We can hardly leave them there by themselves."

Happy's ears flattened and his tail drooped. "Aye sir," he agreed unhappily.

"Good," Natsu said with a sharp nod. "I'll bring Gray back to the guild in the morning. Goodnight, everyone. See you tomorrow."

There was a muted chorus of goodbyes as Natsu headed out of the guild hall, Gray by his side. The ice mage didn't say anything, and Natsu was content to brood in silence as they walked back to the apartment. He noticed that although Gray's movements were still mechanical and unwieldy, they had improved a great deal from the day before. He made a mental note to take Gray out walking or something to help improve his coordination and motor skills.

Arriving at Gray's apartment, Natsu fished the key out of his pocket and let them in. They filed soundlessly into the living room.

"The bedroom is over there," Natsu reminded his friend, pointing towards the door at the other end of the room. "Feel free to turn in. I know it's been a long day." The bag of potions lying abandoned on the side table caught Natsu's eye, and the dragon slayer grimaced. "Actually, wait a second. There's some potion you're supposed to take before bed."

Gray watched impassively as Natsu dumped the potions out of the bag and began sorting through the bottles. The dragon slayer was exhausted and his mind was too fuzzy for him to remember all the instructions Porlyusica had given him earlier. He had never been very good at rote memorization at the best of times, and his tiredness wasn't helping things. It would have been very helpful if Porlyusica had bothered to put labels on all these bottles, but Natsu supposed that he would have to do that himself. Tomorrow. He was too damn tired tonight.

He picked up one of the bottles and swirled its contents gently as he squinted at it. He was pretty sure this was the one he had been thinking of. Now he just had to remember what all the dosage instructions had been. Then he sighed wearily. He was about 70% confident that Porlyusica had said that this medicine should be taken along with food.

Heading into the kitchen, he opened the fridge and peered inside. It was empty. Natsu shut the refrigerator and briefly closed his eyes as he rested his head against the closed door. No one had lived here for a year and a half—of course there was no food. Natsu briefly considered running out to the store to grab some bread or something, but he was too tired to convince himself to do it. Gray had eaten dinner at the guild like an hour ago, so that would have to be enough.

"Okay, drink this," he told Gray, heading back into the living room and measuring out the medicine.

The ice mage obediently gulped down the mixture, not making even the slightest grimace of disgust. Natsu was impressed despite himself. The potion had smelled absolutely vile, and he didn't suppose that it tasted any better. Then again, that kind of thing didn't seem to bother Gray anymore.

The dragon slayer was tempted to just go to bed and leave Gray to his own devices, but he dragged himself to bathroom and demonstrated the important nighty rituals to the ice mage, such as brushing his teeth. Afterwards, he took Gray to the bedroom and made sure that he got settled. Gray safely in bed, Natsu hovered by the doorway watching him.

"Goodnight, Gray. And please, don't do that drifting thing again. You scared us all half to death. I was terrified."

Gray's dark eyes studied him expressionlessly. "Sorry," the ice mage said.

Natsu grimaced faintly, remembering when Gray had apologized to him in the void but hadn't really understood what that meant.

"Are you? Really?" he asked, echoing his words from before.

Something sparked in Gray's eyes, and Natsu wondered if his friend remembered that piece of their conversation as well. His suspicions were confirmed when Gray repeated his same response from the void.

"No, probably not."

Natsu turned away and laughed softly. It was a tired, bitter sound. "Then don't apologize," he said quietly. "In any case, I don't need your apologies. Just don't do it again. Please."

There was a brief pause.

"Okay," Gray said.

Natsu looked back at him with anguished eyes. "Don't give up yet. I know you're still having a hard time coping, but this really is better than the void. We'll help you remember and teach you how to live again. Just give us a chance. Give us a chance before you decide that this life isn't worth living."

Another pause.

"Okay."

Natsu stared at Gray, searching his eyes for any sign that his friend understood and would actually try to grant him this favor despite his apathy. He needed a sign that Gray meant what he said, that his words weren't just words. The ice mage's unreadable eyes gave nothing away, but after the silence stretched on for several long seconds, he sighed and added something else.

"I'll stay," he said quietly. "I'll still be here when you come back."

Natsu's eyes burned with sudden tears and he turned away so that Gray wouldn't see him crying.

"Okay. Goodnight," he choked out, flipping off the light and shutting the door.

He let out a shuddering breath and leaned back against the closed door, staring blankly ahead of him through his tear-clouded vision. He hadn't realized exactly how much he needed to hear that from Gray. When they had fought Tartaros, Gray had told Natsu to go and Natsu had left. But he had left with the expectation that Gray would still be there when he got back. Instead, he had come back to find out that Gray was 'dead'.

Another silent sob racked his body, but he pushed himself away from the door and stumbled over to the living room couch. He wanted to sit up and cry or wait outside Gray's door again and listen to the ice mage's breathing to make sure that he was really still there. But he was too damn tired, so he collapsed onto the couch and went to sleep instead.

He would just have to trust that this time Gray really would still be there when he woke up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Lyon. He really got the short end of the stick here x.x But hey, I did say that I came up with a plausible reason to keep Juvia mostly out of this, and this setup actually serves a lot of other purposes too.


	12. Ch 11-Natsu meets the landlady

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's kind of, sort of an OC here, but she's just the landlady and she's only here because her existence makes a later event more plausible. She won't be a big part of the story.

* * *

**Chapter 11**

_(In which Natsu meets the landlady and makes an ally.)_

* * *

When Natsu woke up the next morning, the first thing that registered in his sleep-addled brain was an urgent need to make sure that Gray was still in the next room. The ice mage had said he would still be there in the morning, and Natsu needed that to be true. He slithered off the sofa and stumbled across the floor. His first instinct was to slam the door open and go prod at Gray to make sure the ice mage was conscious and alive, but he forced himself to pause outside the door and press his ear against its wooden surface instead.

The quiet, even breathing suggested that Gray was still asleep, so Natsu reluctantly decided not to go in the room. The thought occurred to Natsu that maybe Gray was drifting rather than sleeping, which made him want to burst in there anyway. But Gray had agreed not to drift, and for now Natsu would have to trust him. Forcing himself to turn away from the door, the dragon slayer glanced at the clock on the far wall to see that it was only 8:30 a.m. They would have to go to the guild early to appease the others, but they could spare an hour or so. Natsu needed to get ready anyway, so he might as well let Gray sleep.

Yawning, he headed into the bathroom to shower, thankful that Gray kept spares of everything in easy to find places. If this living situation became a little more permanent then Natsu would have to stop by his house to pick up some clothes and things, but for now he was content to use Gray's stuff.

After making himself at least reasonably presentable, Natsu went back to the living room and began rummaging about in the drawers on Gray's desk. The ice mage had kept his apartment so freakishly clean and organized that it wasn't hard to find paper and a pen. Natsu lugged all of Porlyusica's potions into the kitchen and dumped them out on the table. Sitting down, the dragon slayer began writing labels for them all. Now that he was more awake he could recall more of Porlyusica's instructions, and he wrote down what he could remember. When he couldn't quite remember a dosage or purpose or specialized instruction, he took his best guess and wrote a question mark beside it. Hopefully he could figure those out later. It's not like he'd poison Gray if he forgot one itty bitty thing here or there. Probably.

He was about halfway through this chore when there was a sudden knock on the front door. Natsu jerked in surprise at the unexpected sound. Then he groaned as he realized that it was probably someone coming early to check on Gray. Couldn't they wait forty minutes until Natsu took Gray over to the guild himself? Natsu sincerely hoped that it wasn't Lyon at the door, because he wasn't sure that he could deal with the other mage's overprotectiveness and uncooperativeness this early in the morning.

Reluctantly abandoning his labelling endeavor, Natsu walked over to the entrance of the apartment and tried to wipe the irritated scowl off his face before opening the door. The door swung open to reveal a little old lady holding a basket. Natsu blinked at her in bewilderment for a moment, wondering who she was and what she was doing here.

"Who are you?" he blurted out before he could stop himself. He winced instinctively at how rude he sounded, but the woman just laughed and studied him with twinkling eyes.

"I'm the landlady, dear," she answered good-naturedly. "Lyon told me that Gray was back. May I come in?"

"Um, sure," Natsu said slowly, still a little confused about this strange turn of events.

Stepping aside so that she could walk past him into the apartment, Natsu shut the door behind her and studied her curiously. She immediately headed for the kitchen and Natsu trailed after her uncertainly. She hummed thoughtfully as she saw the medicines and paper labels strewn all over the table, but found a clear patch of the wooden surface to deposit the basket she had been carrying.

"Can I ask what you're doing here?" Natsu asked cautiously, eyeing her from where he stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

She smiled over at him.

"I thought that I would bring over some food in case you haven't had the chance to go shopping yet. I cleared all the old food out of here a long time ago so that it wouldn't spoil." She began unpacking the basket and setting food on the table. "I brought some bread and cheese and an assortment of meats. And I know that growing young men don't want to eat their fruits and vegetables, but I brought some anyway. I also picked up some eggs for your breakfast, and I cooked a casserole in case you don't feel like making a meal."

Nonplussed, Natsu watched as she cheerfully rattled off a list of the food she had brought and then began transferring all of the cold foods to the refrigerator. It was amazing how she immediately made herself at home. She seemed so at ease that Natsu wondered if Gray had invited her in before.

"You'll have to plug in the fridge, of course," she added as an afterthought as she finished stuffing food in the refrigerator and closed the door. "I unplugged the appliances to save on the bills. Could you do that, dear?"

"Of course."

Natsu hurried over and peered behind the fridge. It took a couple tries to find the right plug and outlet, but soon the appliance was humming away happily. He turned back to the landlady. She was watching him with a smile, and he found himself giving her a small smile in return. Her cheerfulness was infectious, and he couldn't help but like her, despite the absurdity of the situation. But he also didn't really know her and didn't know how much she knew, so he needed to make sure that she understood what was going on here.

"Um, you do know that Gray doesn't remember anything, right?" he asked carefully.

Her easy smile slid away and was replaced by a melancholy expression as she sighed heavily. "Yes, Lyon told me, but I thought I would see it for myself anyway. Gray is a fine young man and I've always been fond of him."

"I think he's still sleeping," the dragon slayer offered.

She nodded, but seemed more interested in studying him. He shifted uncomfortably under her close scrutiny, wondering what she found so interesting about him. He hoped he didn't have something on his face.

"You are Natsu, right?" she said finally, still looking him up and down.

He started in surprise and frowned. "Yes…" he answered slowly. "Um, I don't think I know you though?"

She laughed, the corners of her eyes crinkling as she smiled at him brightly. "No, you wouldn't," she said cheerfully. "Why don't we sit out in the living room and talk while we wait for Gray?"

Natsu obediently followed her back into the living area and sat down in an armchair across from her. Her genuine cheerfulness was starting to put him at ease, but he was still confused at how she knew his name when he hadn't introduced himself. The landlady settled herself comfortably in her chair and neatly folded her hands in her lap as she started talking.

"Gray has lived here for several years now," she began. "He was always busy running around on jobs and missions with you Fairy Tail wizards, but when he had free time, he'd sometimes invite me in and listen to me talk about my grandchildren or tell old stories. I'm sure that listening to an old woman's rambling must have bored him at times, but he was always very patient with me. It was nice because sometimes it gets lonely if it's been too long since my children or grandchildren have visited, but he would always take some time out of his day if I needed to talk.

"And he was always doing favors and chores for me," she added thoughtfully. "If my arthritis was acting up he would go grocery shopping for me or fetch me whatever I needed. He was very good at fixing things too, when they broke. I remember that the air conditioning broke a few summers ago when it was very hot, and he stayed in to cool down the building with his magic."

She smiled at the memory and then fixed Natsu with a knowing look.

"And I would ask him about his own life too, and he would tell me stories about his Fairy Tail friends and all the missions you went on together. I recognize you from his descriptions and stories. He told me all about you."

Natsu swallowed nervously at that and decided to do some damage control. He couldn't imagine that Gray's description of him had been all that flattering, considering how often they were at each other's throats.

"I'm sure he exaggerated a lot of it," the dragon slayer said hurriedly. "I mean, I'm not  _always_ that bad."

The landlady just stared at him for a moment, and then she started laughing. Natsu blinked at her in consternation as she tried to rein in her mirth.

"You're talking about what a troublemaker you are? Oh yes, he told me about all the trouble you caused and all the fights you two got into, but do you really think that he stopped there?" She smiled at him affectionately. "Gray was always very fond of you, you know, and he had a great deal of respect for you. He told me about the fights, but he told me about the good times too. I do recall that he referred to you as his best friend on more than one occasion."

Natsu stared at her in stunned disbelief for a moment before looking away and biting his lip.

"Yeah, he was my best friend too," he said quietly.

The landlady leaned forward a little. "You have the look of a guilty man," she said gently. "What is it that's been eating at you?"

Natsu started in surprise, wondering if he was really that easy to read. She watched him sympathetically, without any hint of judgment or condemnation. There was something about her that made him want to give her an answer, so exhaled shakily and leaned back in the chair.

"I left him," he replied, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "I thought that he would still be here when I came back, but he wasn't. He was…They told me he was dead. And I hadn't been here because I left."

His fingernails dug painfully into his palms as he instinctively clenched his hands into fists, and he looked away to study the ground with narrowed eyes. Tears seared at the back of his eyes, but thankfully they didn't fall.

The old lady sighed softly and leaned back again.

"I've lived a long time and I like to think that I have a pretty good idea of how the world works by now," she remarked. "If there's one thing I've learned, it's that people always leave. They move away or they run off on missions or they leave you behind. At some point, they'll always leave you. Now, the way you can tell whether or not they really care about you is if they come back again. You came back, didn't you?"

She fixed him with a knowing look, and he stared back at her soundlessly for several seconds. It was true that wizards were always running off on jobs and missions, but they always came back to the guild. The only thing that had been different this time was that Gray had 'died' when Natsu was gone. It didn't make what the dragon slayer had done all that much better, but he wanted to believe that the landlady was right. He had come back and he had fought until he found a way to bring Gray back as well. Surely that had to count for something?

He was about to open his mouth to respond when her gaze slid past him and she spoke again instead.

"Good morning, dear."

Startled, Natsu hurriedly turned around as far as the armchair would allow, and saw that Gray was standing silently in the entrance to the living room. He was watching Natsu with a mildly thoughtful expression, and the dragon slayer wondered how long he had been standing there and how much he had heard. It was hard to keep track of the ice mage when he was so damn quiet these days.

At the landlady's words, Gray switched his unreadable gaze to her instead. Natsu waited for him to say something, but he remained silent. The dragon slayer sighed tiredly.

"Be polite, Gray," he instructed.

Gray looked back at him. "I don't understand," he said flatly.

Natsu's fingernails bit into his palms again at this latest reminder of how screwed up Gray currently was.

"When someone greets you—when they say good morning or hello or ask you how you're doing or anything like that—you're supposed to respond," he explained, his voice brittle.

Gray remained impassive for several long seconds before he returned his gaze to the landlady once more. "Good morning," he told her shortly.

She watched him with a sad expression, and Natsu hurried to do some damage control.

"I don't know how much Lyon told you, but it's not only that Gray doesn't have his memories," the dragon slayer explained. "He doesn't mean to be rude. It's just…He doesn't really understand a lot of things right now. His emotions and communications skills are still really messed up and there are a lot of things about the world that he's forgotten."

The old woman waved off his worried ramblings. She smiled at him and Gray serenely.

"It's quite alright, dear. I suppose I hadn't realized exactly how bad the damage was. I really only met Lyon when he came to talk to me about keeping Gray's apartment, a few other times when he came to visit, and yesterday when he told me Gray was back. And he was in rather a hurry, so I daresay he didn't give me all the details. All I knew was that Gray was alive again but had lost his memories. Perhaps you could fill me in sometime, but for now I think I'd best be leaving so that you can prepare for your day."

She stood slowly, wincing slightly as she pulled herself out of the chair and straightened up. Natsu jumped out of his chair and hurried over to see if he could help her, but she waved him off good-naturedly.

"I'm fine, it's just my arthritis acting up again. Enjoy your youth while you can."

She laughed a little, and Natsu found himself smiling at her in return.

"Would you like to stay for breakfast?" he asked her. He wasn't sure whether or not that was the best idea with Gray being the way he was, but it only seemed fair to offer since she was the one who had brought them all the food in the first place.

"Oh no," she replied with a slight shake of her head. "I'm sure you don't need an old woman hanging around today. Perhaps we could arrange something later, after Gray has recovered a little more, yes?"

"Alright," Natsu agreed. "It was nice meeting you."

"And you too," she answered as she hobbled over to the door and opened it. "I just wanted to let you know that I'm right next door. If you ever need anything while you're staying here, feel free to come over and ask." She stepped out into the hallway and smiled back at them. "Goodbye."

"Goodbye," Natsu said as she began walking away.

"Goodbye," Gray echoed obediently.

Natsu shut the door behind her and turned back to Gray with a sigh. The other mage just stared at him in that unsettling way he had now. Natsu decided that the best course of action would be to get him ready to go back to the guild, so he ushered Gray into the bathroom and quickly recapped all the important parts of getting ready for the day, from brushing teeth to showering. Leaving Gray to do his thing—and hopefully do it  _right_ —Natsu headed back to the kitchen to start on breakfast.

He quickly threw some bacon and eggs on the stove and sat back down at the table to finish writing out the labels for the medicines while he kept an eye on the food so that it didn't burn. By the time Gray returned, Natsu had finished with the potions and set them off to the side, and was dishing out breakfast onto some plates he had found in the cabinets. It was truly sad how neat and tidy Gray kept his cabinets—they were far less interesting than Natsu's. The dragon slayer fully intended to fix that.

"I made breakfast," Natsu said cheerily as he motioned for Gray to sit down in front of one of the plates.

The ice mage obeyed and started eating his food halfheartedly. Natsu noticed with some satisfaction that he was having much less trouble with the fork than he had had the last couple days. It might still be a while before Gray lost that mechanical, jerky quality to his movements, but the obvious improvements were encouraging.

Leaving Gray to pick at his food, Natsu searched through the array of medicines until he found the one he was looking for. For the life of him he couldn't remember what it was supposed to do, but he clearly recalled Porlyusica instructing him to give it to Gray twice a day with food. He carefully measured out the dosage indicated on the label he had written out, squinting in an attempt to read his own messy scrawl, and handed the foul-smelling liquid to his friend. Gray hesitated a moment before obediently swallowing it down.

Natsu nodded in satisfaction and screwed the lid back on to the bottle before sitting to wolf down his own breakfast. He eyed Gray as he ate, debating how he should break the silence.

"That was the landlady," he said finally. "She owns your apartment and rents it to you."

Gray gave him a suitably unimpressed look before returning to his plate. Holding a conversation with Gray wasn't exactly easy, and Natsu wasn't sure that he had the energy to do it right now. They lapsed into silence instead, until Natsu had finished eating and deemed that Gray had eaten enough. He threw the dirty dishes into the sink, figuring that he would do them later. Maybe. Cleaning and chores were never high on his list of priorities.

"Alright," he said briskly, checking the clock to see that it was almost 10 a.m. "It's time for us to head to the guild."

He quickly gathered up everything he needed and double-checked that Gray was wearing shoes and appropriate clothing. Then he hustled the ice mage out the door and locked the apartment behind them. As they began walking towards the guild, Natsu decided that now was a good time to give Gray some last minute instructions.

"Okay, I know that Lyon and the others make you uncomfortable." Seeing Gray's faintly baffled expression, he hurried to clarify. "The…'screamers'."

The label tasted sour in his mouth and he could feel his face contort slightly with distaste. Gray nodded in acknowledgement and didn't seem bothered by Natsu's dislike of his terminology.

"But you should really try to get along with them," Natsu continued. "They know that you're a little uneasy around them so they'll try to give you some space, but you need to learn how to start feeling more comfortable with them, so give them a chance. They care about you a lot and they feel really hurt when you do things like avoiding them and flinching away if they get too close to you. Okay?"

Gray shrugged. "Okay."

"And no more drifting," Natsu added.

Gray gave him a flat look. "You already said that."

"It's important enough to repeat," the dragon slayer countered.

"Okay."

It was hard to hold a conversation when the other person was overly fond of monosyllabic responses and had no interest in talking, so the pair stayed quiet for the rest of the commute. When the guild came into sight and Natsu pushed open the doors, he breathed a soft sigh of relief. It was rather draining to be around this new Gray all the time, and he was looking forward to getting some help from the others. That thought made him feel a little guilty, but he couldn't help it.

Everyone in the guild hall looked up eagerly at the sound of the opening door, but they resisted the urge to all speak at once. Perhaps it was an attempt not to overwhelm Gray with too much noise and activity all at the same time.

"Good morning," Lyon said, watching the pair anxiously as they entered the building. "How are you today?"

"Fine, thanks," Natsu answered. "Hello everyone."

Gray remained quiet for a moment and Natsu thought he would have to explain the rules of common courtesy again, but then the ice mage finally spoke.

"Good morning," he said evenly.

No one had really been expecting Gray to respond, and they all looked surprised but pleased when he did. Lyon let out the breath he had been holding and a spark of hope entered his eyes. Natsu wondered if Gray's delay in responding had been because of how uneasy he felt around Lyon. If so, the dragon slayer was pleased that Gray seemed to be taking his advice to be more civil with the 'screamers'.

"You didn't have any trouble?" Erza asked Natsu, staring him down with flinty eyes. "He didn't do any more of that…drifting, did you call it?"

Natsu shook his head. "No more drifting," he confirmed. "And he seems to be doing alright today."

He paused as Happy suddenly came hurtling through the air towards him and slammed into his chest. Natsu let out a small 'oof' as he instinctively wrapped his arms around the little feline. Happy hugged him with his stubby arms.

"Natsu! You're back!"

Natsu laughed a little and patted Happy on the head.

"Of course I am." He looked down at his companion and arched an eyebrow. "Did that lot really give you that much trouble?"

Happy grimaced slightly and wriggled out of the dragon slayer's grasp. He hovered in the air and spoke softly into Natsu's ear.

"It was really awkward, Natsu."

Natsu could imagine. "I take it that Lyon took me up on my offer and stayed over then?"

"Yes," Happy replied. "But he didn't really say anything all night, just sat and brooded. And Rogue already doesn't talk that much, so it was mostly just me and Sting trying to keep up a conversation to get rid of some of the awkwardness. It was terrible. Will you come home tonight?"

Natsu gave him an apologetic look and shrugged. "Sorry about that. And I don't know. We'll have to discuss living arrangements again later."

Happy sighed and looked discontented, but whatever he was going to say was lost when Sting and Rogue suddenly flung open the door to the backroom and hurried back out into the main hall. Sting wore an impressive scowl and Rogue didn't look very pleased himself. Catching sight of Natsu, Sting stalked over to his fellow dragon slayer, Rogue on his heels.

"Is everything okay?" Natsu asked in concern, wondering what had upset the normally cheerful mage.

Sting's scowl deepened.

"You will not  _believe_  the message Sabertooth just sent us," he muttered, sliding a small lacrima into his pocket. "Apparently Orga and Rufus did a number on some town and got hauled in front of the Council. Which wouldn't have been a big deal, except that they then insulted and started a brawl with one of the members. And now, instead of being given a warning and released, they're being held in custody and we have to go bail them out."

"Both of you have to be there to bail them out?" Lucy asked.

"Yes," Rogue answered. "Sting has to be there because he's technically the leader of the guild. I have to be there because I do all the real work. Someone is going to have to fill out all the paperwork."

Natsu snorted in amusement, but Sting was still irritated and kept right on talking despite the interruption.

"I'm sure it was mostly Orga's fault and Rufus just happened to be on a job with him, but they're both in trouble now. I don't know how long it will take to get them cleared. At  _least_ a week, I would imagine. Maybe more, depending on who they insulted and how much damage they did."

Natsu couldn't contain his laughter anymore. Sting's indignation was hilarious to watch. Sabertooth's leader gave him a baleful look.

"Laugh all you want, but remember that you wanted Rufus's help in trying to get Gray some of his memories back. And now Rufus is being detained by the Magic Council and could be out of commission for weeks."

That sobered Natsu immediately. He straightened up and grimaced. "Damn, I didn't think about that."

Sting sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "The Council never used to give us this much trouble because they were always distracted with you all, but Fairy Tail hasn't been causing enough problems since it reformed, so they're cracking down on us too. Hopefully we can sort this out quickly."

Natsu looked over at Gray with a frown, not liking the idea that the process of bringing back his memories would be delayed by this. But at the same time…He smiled ruefully. It was still kind of funny.

"Usually it's me who gets dragged in for that kind of thing," he remarked, half amused.

Sting cracked a smile. "Yeah. Oh, alright, it's a little funny. But only because I'm not the one who is going to have to deal with the mountains of paperwork."

Rogue threw him a scathing look. "God forbid you do any real work," he grumbled.

"Why should I?" Sting asked cheerfully. "I have you to do it for me."

Rogue rolled his eyes, but Sting quickly sobered as he looked back over at Natsu.

"I'm sorry, Natsu-san. We'll go back and try to sort this out as quickly as possible. When we figure it all out, we'll come back and bring Rufus with us."

Natsu's mirth faded as well and he repressed another sigh. With all the progress Gray had made over the last couple days, he had been hoping that they could get started with Rufus and Meredy soon, perhaps after Gray's next checkup in a couple days. Well, he had already waited months, so what was a few weeks more? He still unhappy about it, but it wasn't an insurmountable hurdle.

"It's alright," Natsu reassured the other dragon slayer. "It's not your fault. Good luck dealing with the Council."

"Thanks," Sting answered. "We'll need it."

And then he and Rogue were gone, arguing in low voices as they rushed out of the guild. Natsu stared after them, wondering when they'd be back. Soon, hopefully.

"Well, that's going to be a pain," Lucy said with a sigh. "I hope it doesn't take them too long."

"We'll just have a little extra time to work with Gray before we try using magic," Erza said firmly. She had seemed rather downcast at Sting's news as well, but she had quickly channeled her frustration and unhappiness into determination. "And we might as well get started now."

"By doing what?" Lyon asked, still watching Gray. He shifted eagerly, impatient to get started.

Erza turned her considering gaze to Gray as well. Natsu knew her well enough to realize that the calculating look meant that she was running through their options and formulating a plan.

"There's not a whole lot we can do about his memory right now," she said finally, speaking slowly as she considered her next words. "I mean, we can keep pointing things out to him and reminding him of things we've done, but that's about it. But there  _are_ a few things we could work on. For instance, his motor skills."

"His movements have been improving," Natsu interrupted, eager to share some good news.

"That's good," Erza conceded, "but you know that he still moves strangely, and his balance is still pretty bad at times. The only way he can fix that is with practice. Like…physical therapy."

"Physical therapy," Gajeel repeated flatly.

Erza shot him an annoyed look, clearly displeased that people kept interrupting her.

"Yes," she said impatiently. "Porlyusica said he was probably having trouble moving normally because of the curse and the void, but she also mentioned that part of it might be because his muscles are out of practice and might have atrophied slightly while his body was in stasis."

"Huh?" Natsu asked, frowning slightly. "When did she say that? Because I was there the whole time and I didn't…" He trailed off and gulped loudly as Erza fixed him with a death glare. "Um…never mind. Carry on."

Erza sighed in annoyance and rolled her eyes before continuing. "I think it would be a good idea if we make sure he gets in a lot of walking, and it might help if we can find him tasks that will help him improve his finer movements. In fact, I would like to go for a walk with him right now. Would you like to come with me, Gray?"

The ice mage stared at her blankly for a second, before switching his gaze back over to Natsu again. The dragon slayer was about to nod in agreement, but stopped himself. Gray needed to stop depending on him so heavily, and would have to start learning how to make decisions for himself sometime. So instead, Natsu met Gray's gaze evenly, without any sign of agreement or disagreement.

Gray watched him for several seconds before realizing that he wasn't going to get any further instructions. He looked between Natsu and Erza a couple times, and then his normal apathetic expression melted into an almost lost, forlorn look. He shuffled his feet uncomfortably, finally looking a little uneasy now that he didn't have Natsu to give him guidance and make his decisions for him.

"Okay?" the ice mage said finally, his usually flat, mechanical voice lilting upwards in a questioning fashion.

Erza smiled at him reassuringly. "It'll be okay," she told him cheerfully. "I don't bite. We'll just walk around the city for a bit. It's a nice day out, and it'll do you some good to get outside and start relearning your way around the city."

Gray still looked uncertain, so Natsu finally stepped in.

"Don't worry, it should be fun," the dragon slayer added. "And Erza is great too. Maybe you can work on getting to know her a little better. Have a good time."

Gray seemed to relax a little when Natsu finally spoke, and his anxious tension faded back into his normal apathy. Erza started walking towards the entrance of the guild and Gray followed, but she paused and turned back before exiting the building.

"And while we're gone, you can conduct the interrogation," she told Lyon.

Natsu glanced between Erza and Lyon in mild confusion. Interrogation? Then Lyon fixed him with a hard look and he held back a groan. Of course.

"I really don't think that—" the dragon slayer started, before Lyon cut him off.

"I will," the older ice mage said firmly.

Erza gave Natsu an almost sympathetic look before she turned and walked out of the guild, Gray on her heels. As soon as she disappeared, Lyon began the assault. He fired off question after question, asking Natsu about every minute detail of his time with Gray and every little thing Gray had done. There were questions about the drifting, about whether or not Natsu had remembered to give Gray all his medicine, about anything and everything Gray might have said, about whether or not Gray had coughed up any more blood or started trembling again, about if Natsu had done everything right in taking care of him. And then Juvia and the others got in on the action, asking all sorts of questions about Gray's progress and Natsu's caretaking.

These and hundreds of other questions were directed at the dragon slayer, and Natsu did his best to answer them all patiently, despite his growing irritation. He knew that they were only being so overprotective and pushy because they were worried about Gray and were eager to understand more about the ice mage's state of mind, so he tried to humor them. All the same, his replies became shorter and terser as time wore on. He could feel himself on the edge of telling everyone to shut the hell up already, but surprisingly it was Happy who snapped first.

"Stop!" the Exceed yelled finally, after nearly forty minutes of continuous questioning. Everyone looked at him in shock, but he didn't back down. Moving to hover in the air next to Natsu, he glared back at them indignantly. "Natsu's having a hard time too. Give him a break."

Several people's surprised expressions morphed into embarrassed or apologetic ones, and even Lyon had the grace to look a little repentant. Happy opened his mouth again, likely to continue chewing them out for being insensitive, but Natsu patted him gently on the head to stop him.

"That's enough," he said quietly as the little cat looked back at him questioningly. "Thank you, Happy."

Some of Happy's earlier indignation melted away and his tail drooped sadly.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled, half to their audience and half to Natsu. "They just kept going and you were getting really upset and uncomfortable and they didn't even notice. And it's all been really hard for you because of how bad you felt about what happened to Gray and because it's so exhausting taking care of him now. And I just—"

Natsu snatched Happy out of the air and hugged him gently to stop his rambling.

"Don't apologize," Natsu said with a tired smile. "It's okay."

"We're the ones who should be apologizing," Lucy added. "We weren't trying to make you uncomfortable, Natsu. I guess we just got a little caught up in wanting to know everything that happened."

Lyon sighed, his earlier intensity draining away as he rubbed at his face wearily. "I'm sorry too," he muttered. "I just wanted to make sure you were taking care of Gray properly since I can't be there. I might have gone a little overboard."

Natsu carefully deposited Happy on a nearby bench and gave the others a reassuring smile.

"It's okay. I'd probably go a little crazy too, if it was someone else Gray had taken to and I missed out on a lot of his care. I don't mind answering questions and giving you updates on what's going on, just…maybe tone it down a little?"

There was a chorus of muted agreement, and a few brave souls started up a half-joking debate over whether or not the Magic Council was going to come after Fairy Tail next. Everyone studiously avoided mentioning Gray, and although Natsu really was concerned about his best friend and wanted to brainstorm ways to get his memory back, he was also grateful for the temporary distraction. It was nice to take a few minutes to think about something other than Gray for once.

So he joined in on the discussion, cheerfully maintaining that if the Council didn't start targeting them again soon then he'd  _give_ them a reason to, and soon everyone was laughing and joking around. This went on until Erza and Gray finally walked back into the guild hall.

"You were gone for an awfully long time," Lucy remarked good-naturedly, still in a good mood from their lively conversation. "Did you have a nice walk?"

Natsu frowned a little as he noticed that Erza was looking rather disheartened, but the requip mage quickly replaced her discouraged grimace with a smile. Natsu glanced over at Gray suspiciously. It might just be that Erza had been trying to get him to remember things and hadn't had any luck, but he bet a good part of it was just that Gray hadn't really wanted to talk to her. Just being around the ice mage and seeing how far he had fallen could be disheartening enough on its own.

"The weather was so nice that we ended up staying out longer than we expected," Erza answered. "We pretty much just walked all over Magnolia. Gray isn't very talkative at the moment, but other than that everything went well and I think the exercise did him some good. In fact, I think it would be a good idea to make this a daily ritual until his physical functioning is back to normal."

A spark of steely determination flickered in her eyes, and Natsu got the feeling that she was going to make this into one of her projects. She would keep it up until she got the results she wanted, and she'd work herself to the bone until she got there. He just hoped that whatever her main goal happened to be was achievable, or she was setting herself up for a lot of heartache.

"Sounds like a good idea," he agreed, instead of voicing his concerns. "And it will also be a good opportunity for you guys to spend more time with him so that he starts getting used to you."

Erza stole a sidelong look at Gray's impassive face before turning back to Natsu and nodding. "Yeah, something like that."

"And now," Natsu said cheerily, deftly changing the subject, "I think it's time to eat lunch since you took so long to get back. I'm starving!"

Erza shook her head in fond amusement. "You and your stomach," she commented dryly.

All the same, she and several other guild members ordered food for lunch. Natsu placed an order for Gray and Happy as well as for himself, and then sat down with Erza and Lucy. As the girls started talking about a new dessert shop that had opened up a few streets away, Natsu leaned towards Gray a little.

"How was your walk?" he asked in a low voice.

Gray shrugged, not seeming particularly interested. "Fine."

Natsu sighed. "I thought I asked you to try talking to her."

Gray shrugged again. "I'm not good at…talking."

"I know," Natsu said with another sigh. "I know."

Mira brought their food over at that point and Natsu left Gray to pick at his meal in silence, instead turning his attention to the girls' conversation. Then he winced as he noticed that Juvia had sidled up next to Gray, holding a plate of food in her hands. She looked small and nervous, and Meredy stood a little ways behind her with an uncertain expression on her face.

"May Juvia and Meredy-san eat with Gray-sama?" the water mage asked. She shifted uncomfortably and had a sad look in her eyes, but her voice was layered with cautious hope. Meredy winced slightly, and Natsu got the feeling that she hadn't been completely on board with this plan.

Natsu schooled his features to give nothing away when Gray looked to him for assistance, but the ice mage kept his cool gaze on Juvia and didn't so much as glance at the dragon slayer. Perhaps he wasn't expecting any help from Natsu after last time. Lucy, Erza, and Happy lapsed into silence as they waited to see how Gray would react, and it seemed like everyone was holding a collective breath. Gray didn't respond for several long seconds, but then he shifted his attention back to his plate and began awkwardly stabbing at his food again.

"Okay," he said.

Juvia's face lit up like a Christmas tree and she happily sat down next to Gray. The ice mage started to shift away, but then grimaced faintly and forced himself to stay in place. Natsu smiled a little, glad that Gray was taking his advice. Meredy also looked surprised and relieved, and she was in much better spirits when she sat down next to Juvia.

"I'm sure Lyon-san would like to join Gray-sama as well, if that's okay?" Juvia pressed cautiously.

Natsu instinctively glanced over at the next table, to see Lyon watching the exchange with a hungry expression. Gray didn't look up, but he nodded slowly.

"Okay."

Lyon hurriedly jumped up from his table and rushed over to sit next to Meredy, as if worried that Gray would change his mind if he wasn't fast enough. Erza and Lucy hesitantly started up their conversation again, and Happy quickly inserted himself once more. Natsu added the occasional comment, but his attention was focused on Gray and how he interacted with the 'screamers'.

Juvia had started up a half-cheerful, half-nervous string of chatter. Her talking could usually put people at ease, and Natsu hoped that it might have a calming effect on Gray as well. The ice mage was still tense and uncomfortable, but he gradually began to relax slightly as Juvia babbled on and Meredy and Lyon joined in the conversation. Every once in a while they would even get replies out of him. They were still short and terse, but Natsu was amazed at how many responses Juvia managed to extract from him. The dragon slayer thought this might be real progress.

But then again, Gray was still clearly ill at ease by the end of the day, even though he was no longer actively avoiding the 'screamers'. He was tolerating their presence, but his wariness hadn't faded as much as Natsu might have hoped. Natsu knew that Lyon and Juvia were still dying to take their turn caring for Gray, but he wasn't sure that was a good idea when the ice mage was still so uneasy around them.

He was trying to come up with a way to tell them that maybe he should just continue caring for Gray for the moment without offending them, but before he had constructed a good enough argument, Lyon came up behind him and pulled him aside. Natsu watched him warily.

"Look," Lyon began, a hint of reluctance tinging his voice, "I know that Gray isn't ready for me or any of the others to take on the role you currently occupy, and I just want what's best for him. You've done a good job taking care of him up to now, so we think it might be best not to change the living arrangements yet."

"We?" Natsu asked stupidly, still trying to process the fact that Lyon was actually giving in on such an important matter.

"Me and Juvia," Lyon said with a faint grimace. "I…talked to her earlier and convinced her that this was the best option for now."

Natsu glanced across the room at the water mage with a new understanding. He had noticed that she had disappeared for a brief spell a couple hours earlier, and she had been quiet and even sadder than usual since then. If he had to guess, he would say that she didn't necessarily share Lyon's sentiment. He wondered how the older ice mage had gotten her to agree.

"Oh," Natsu said after a pause. He looked at Lyon suspiciously. "Really?"

Lyon glanced away. "Yeah. I mean, I still want to take care of him, but there are good reasons why it should be you for now. You have the best understanding of how he thinks and acts, you've already been taking care of him for a couple of days now so you know how to do it well, and he trusts you the most. I know that I sometimes seem a little…aggressive and overprotective, but when it comes down to it, I really just want what's best for Gray. If what's best for Gray right now is you, then so be it."

Natsu stared at him in shock. With how strongly Lyon had been pushing against him the past day and a half, he hadn't been expecting such a show of maturity or drastic concession. Up to this point, Natsu had mostly considered Lyon as something of an annoyance and an obstacle to be tolerated because of his close connection to Gray. But now…Perhaps Lyon could make a good ally after all.

"Happy, um…" Natsu started, shifting awkwardly. Now it was his turn to look away in embarrassment. "Well, he told me that you asked Fairy Tail to give me Gray's necklace because of how, um…upset I'd be. And I…I know that it would have still been kind of important to you too. So, um, thanks."

Natsu could feel Lyon's gaze burning into him, so he reluctantly looked up again and met the older ice mage's eyes. Lyon's eyes were unreadable, but not unfriendly.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Gray is my top priority, but he's not my  _only_ one." Natsu tried to decipher all the meaning in that statement, but Lyon glanced up at the clock and kept right on talking. "It's getting late. You should probably take Gray home."

Natsu stared at him a moment longer before nodding slowly. "Yeah. We'd better leave now so that I can grab a few things from my place on the way over." He paused and eyed the other mage. "Are you still staying over at my house with Happy?"

Lyon shrugged. "Unless you want me to go."

"Nah, it's fine. I'm going to swing by the house before heading back to the apartment. Do you want to come with us?"

Lyon frowned thoughtfully for a moment as he considered it. Then a regretful look spread over his face and he shook his head.

"Probably not a good idea," he replied. "Gray's been stuck in here all day and he was around me and Juvia and Meredy for a while too. It's probably better to give him a break. We wouldn't want him to get too overwhelmed and start drifting again." He hesitated for a moment before adding something else. "But…thank you for the offer."

"No problem," Natsu answered, glad that the conciliatory gesture had at least been acknowledged. "I guess you're probably right. Maybe next time?" His eyes softened a little. "He'll warm up to you eventually. Besides, you're the only one here who's gonna be able to teach him how to use his magic again. He'll have to like you then."

Lyon laughed a little. "Yeah, okay. Goodnight, Natsu."

"'Night," Natsu replied. He started to turn away but then glanced back. "Oh, and by the way, try being a little more social, yeah? Sting and Rogue aren't going to be there anymore, and you wouldn't want to make Happy too uncomfortable."

Lyon blinked at him in consternation for a few seconds before smiling sheepishly. "I'll try," he said.

Natsu was itching to grab Gray and head back to the apartment, but he bit his lip and hesitated for a moment longer. Lyon didn't really seem overtly upset, but Natsu knew that he was still unhappy, and there was still something sad and broken in his eyes. Normally Natsu would just let it go because it wasn't his place to take care of it and he avoided anything even remotely emotional, but he felt that maybe they owed Lyon something. Or, at the very least, Lyon was having a really rough time and it was hard to walk away from that.

"Lyon…How are you holding up?" Natsu asked finally, unsure of how to proceed.

Lyon looked surprised for a moment, and then smiled wanly. "I'm doing alright."

It was a clear signal to drop the topic, but now that Natsu had broached the subject, he figured that he might as well go through with it.

"Are you really?" he asked doubtfully. "Because in your place, I wouldn't be alright. And you still have that really sad, hurt look."

Lyon grimaced faintly as he looked off to the side. "I'll be fine," he said. "Don't worry about me. You should be concerned with Gray right now. He's the one who needs all the help he can get."

A good point. Natsu could walk away right now, no harm done. Instead, he sighed.

"Gray might be my top priority right now, but he's not my only one," the dragon slayer said tiredly. Lyon looked up at him sharply, recognizing his words from earlier. "Let's be honest, I don't know you that well. Never really needed to, never really wanted to. But for one, Gray cared about you and if you're his friend, then by extension, you're mine too. And for two, I know that this sucks and that you're hurting. You don't have to tell me anything, but pretending that you're okay when you're not is only going to hurt more."

Natsu would know. He'd tried it once upon a time.

Lyon stared at Natsu, too taken aback to speak for a moment. Then his eyes glazed with unshed tears and he averted his gaze.

"I just…I miss him," he said in a small voice.

"Yeah," Natsu said quietly, wincing at the raw pain in Lyon's voice. "We all do."

"It's like the universe is out to get him or something," Lyon mused absently, his gaze unfocused. "He almost died as a kid, and then I lost contact with him for years after Ur…And when I finally meet him again, the first thing he does is almost get himself killed with iced shell. Twice. And then he was missing for seven years after Acnologia…I thought he was dead. I thought he was dead for seven years. And after the Grand Magic Games, when the dragons attacked, I watched him die." His voice wavered dangerously. "I still can't believe that he came back. Then this. I had to watch him die again and it was terrible, and then I thought he was dead for a year and a half. Now he's somehow magically alive again, but he's not…he's not the same.

"And I keep thinking, did I tell him the things I needed to tell him?" Lyon swallowed. "Did I ever apologize for the things I did? Did I ever tell him what he meant to me? Did he know? And every time he dies or goes missing I think that, but then it's too late. When he comes back I think that I should probably make sure to say it all, but it's just…It's hard to say that, and it feels like why bother saying it now when I have all the time in the world to say it later? Except that that isn't true, because sometimes there is no later, and now it's too late. I might have waited too long this time, because he's back, but he's not the same."

Natsu grimaced faintly as he started to realize that Lyon might be even more upset than he had assumed. Natsu sometimes forgot about the damage the seven-year time skip on Tenrou had done to those left behind. To Natsu, that time had been only a few moments. To Lyon, it would have been seven years. And Natsu hadn't been upset when Gray had died after the Grand Magic Games, simply because he hadn't known until much later. The aftermath of Memento Mori followed a similar pattern, because Natsu hadn't known about Gray's 'death' until a year later, so he had really only mourned for around six months, even if they were a terrible six months. Lyon would have mourned for the full year and a half. Putting it in that perspective, Lyon seemed to have a lot of emotional baggage concerning Gray.

"You know, I was never that good at talking to him either," Natsu said finally. "I mean, we joked around and stuff, but we rarely bothered with anything even remotely touchy-feely. And yeah, there are things I never said to him that I now wish that I had, but at the same time…Well, Gray was always a lot smarter than he let on. I think he could tell exactly how I felt about him even if I didn't come out and say anything. So even though I still feel bad that I didn't say what I needed to say, at least I know that he knew it anyway.

"Same with you. Gray knew you cared about him. So what if you didn't say it in words? I'm sure you got your point across anyway. It would be better to be able to just say it, but he already knew. Besides, it's not like he's gone for good." The dragon slayer's eyes sparked with steely determination. "We'll get him back, memory and all."

Lyon didn't say anything for a minute, instead staring blankly at the ground. "Yeah," he said after a pause. "I guess. It's just that even if he knew it then, he obviously doesn't know it now. And I hate the way he looks at me. Even on Galuna Island when we were facing off as enemies, he never looked at me like that."

Natsu winced. He really didn't know what comfort he could offer about that. Everything about this situation was already hard on everyone, and Gray's distrust of Lyon only made it worse. Natsu didn't know what he'd do if Gray looked at him that way.

"I'm sure that once he starts getting used to you, that will go away. He'll be back to normal in no time, and then he'll remember what you mean to him," Natsu said optimistically. Lyon hummed his unenthusiastic agreement, and Natsu bit his lip. "Well…You saw his memories of his last days before his 'death'. I mean, you must have felt how much he cared about you then. So regardless of what you did or didn't say, he still thought the world of you. And when he gets his memories back, it will go back to that. Doesn't that help, just a little?"

Lyon finally looked up at Natsu, his eyes haunted. "No," the older mage said hoarsely, his voice low. "No, that makes it hurt more."

Natsu frowned and opened his mouth to ask what Lyon meant, but the other mage was already moving on.

"He cared about me and he managed to get that point across even when he was dying, but I couldn't do it. I tried sometimes, but he must have been unconscious for most of it, and it's not enough. What does it matter if he cared about me? I just sat there and watched him die, and I couldn't do anything about it." Lyon let out a brittle laugh, devoid of humor. "I almost got him killed with iced shell on Galuna. When he went missing on Tenrou, I couldn't do anything. When he was killed by the dragonlings, I couldn't do anything but sit there and watch him die. When he got hit by Memento Mori, I couldn't do a goddamn thing to help him."

Lyon let out a shuddering breath. "And when there was apparently hope that maybe he could be saved, I couldn't help him then either, because no one told me. And now I still won't be able to help, because I see the way he looks at me. So many times he's died or almost died or gone missing, and I've never been able to do anything. I always sit back and watch helplessly, because I can't help him."

Natsu let out a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding. He hadn't ever really thought about it that way before, and it honestly sounded pretty terrible. But this…This was why Lyon had been so upset that Fairy Tail hadn't told him about their plan, because now he felt like he had missed out on his chance to help Gray again. He hadn't been able to help Gray before, and now, when it seemed like he might have finally had a chance, it had slipped through his fingers.

"I'm sorry," the dragon slayer said quietly. "But…I'm going to be honest with you here. If I had to do things over, I still probably wouldn't have told you the plan until we had Gray back. I mean, you literally kept Gray's apartment for a year and a half after you thought he died. We didn't want to give you false hope. It would have shattered you, just like it would have shattered us. I was the one who came up with this plan, and in the beginning it was mostly just a crazy scheme born of denial. The chances of success were so, so low. If I told everyone and it failed, it would have been my fault when they got hurt. I wasn't thinking that clearly when I first told Fairy Tail, and then after that I needed their help so I had to tell them. You…I didn't want to give you false hope too.

"I'm not really sorry that we didn't tell you, because I'd do that over again. But I  _am_ sorry that you didn't get the chance to help, because I understand that it hurts. I'm not sorry about what we did, but I'm sorry for how it made you feel. But don't give up now. He'll warm up to you and I think you'll be a big help in getting him back to normal. I mean, you'll have to teach him his magic again, and I'm sure you can be helpful in other ways too. It's not over yet."

Natsu waited to see if Lyon would get angry again, but the other mage just sighed heavily, his gaze drifting away.

"I understand," he murmured. "To be honest, if I'd been the one to come up with this plan, I probably wouldn't have told you either. But it still hurts anyway." He fell silent for a moment as he frowned at the ground.

"You know…I wonder if part of the reason I maintained Gray's apartment was because of how many times he went missing and then showed back up, or died and then came back. Maybe part of me was hoping that he'd reappear out of nowhere like after those seven years, or rise from the dead like he did after the Games." He smiled wryly. "Strangely enough, that part of me was apparently right."

Natsu nodded solemnly. "Gray's really hard to kill," the dragon slayer said, straight-faced. "Like a cockroach."

For a long moment, Lyon just stared at Natsu with a flabbergasted expression. Then he started laughing. Despite the lingering pain, there was also an edge of genuine amusement.

"Yeah," he said with a snort. "It's like death always wants to chew on him a little but then ends up spitting him back out." He straightened himself up and wiped off any indication of their conversation from his face. "Alright, well you'd better take Gray home. He'll need his sleep if we're going to start working to get him back to normal."

Natsu nodded, satisfied that although Lyon wasn't really alright yet, he would be okay for now.

"Okay, I'm going. See you tomorrow, Lyon."

"Goodnight," the older mage said. Something raw and jagged flickered in his eyes for a fraction of a second. "Take care of him for me."

"Of course," Natsu replied.

He studied Lyon a moment longer before shrugging it off and turning away.

Natsu collected Gray and said his goodbyes to everyone, including a distraught Happy, before hustling the ice mage out the door. He paused in the doorway to give everyone one last wave.

"'Night, everyone!"

"Goodnight," a few people chorused.

Natsu turned and stepped out into the chilly night air. The doors slammed shut behind him and Gray, silencing the hubbub within. Natsu glanced back at them and then smiled. Maybe things were looking up now that he had Lyon on his side. Natsu realized ruefully that Lyon had really been on his side all along, even if they had different ways of going about things.

He turned back to face Gray and smiled at him.

"We're going to stop by my place to pick up some clothes and things, and then we'll head back to your apartment for the night."

Gray nodded absently. He was frowning at the closed doors behind them.

"Is something wrong?" Natsu asked, unsure of whether this was just Gray's normal weirdness or something else.

Gray didn't answer immediately, and kept his gaze fixed on the doors even when he finally spoke. "I make him unhappy?" the ice mage asked after a moment.

Natsu stared at him uncomprehendingly for a second, and then his eyes widened.

"Lyon?" he asked in surprise.

Gray looked over at him blankly.

"The guy with white hair," Natsu clarified, remembering that Gray didn't do so well with names.

Gray shrugged and nodded. Natsu studied him thoughtfully, wondering how Gray had picked up on this and why he was actually bringing it up when he didn't seem to care about much of anything.

"Not exactly," the dragon slayer said finally. "He misses the way you were before you lost your memories, and he feels sad and hurt that you're so uncomfortable around him when you weren't before."

Gray shrugged again, whatever temporary interest he'd had in Lyon apparently fading away.

"Does it bother you?" Natsu asked curiously.

"Not really," Gray said flatly.

Natsu winced, but couldn't say he was terribly surprised by the answer. However, he  _was_ surprised that Gray had actually asked a question and expressed some kind of interest in Lyon, even if it had only lasted for a second or two. Maybe, just maybe, it was a good sign.

But Gray was clearly done with the subject now, so Natsu just hummed thoughtfully and led his friend back home, filing the incident—and the hesitant hope it brought—away for later scrutiny.


	13. Ch 12-Gray picks up a new hobby

* * *

**Chapter 12**

_(In which Gray picks up a new hobby and gets a magic lesson.)_

* * *

The next couple of days passed uneventfully, although progress was being made slowly but surely. Natsu frequently found himself waiting around impatiently for Sting and Rogue, but he knew that they likely wouldn't be back for weeks. Instead, he and the others had thrown themselves into trying to get Gray to warm up to everyone and everything again, which mostly involved attempting to make him interact with other people and enjoy it. Or at least not hate it. Not that Natsu was sure that Gray really enjoyed or hated anything, at this point. Regardless, the guild was slowly immersing Gray back into their social circle, being careful not to push him too far again.

Erza had decreed that the daily walk would stay, and she took Gray out every morning without fail. Sometimes the walks were short, sometimes long, and Natsu could tell that they had varied success by reading Erza's face when she brought Gray back. Disappointment seemed to be the norm, but occasionally she would return excited, with a story to tell everyone about something Gray had said or done. Natsu still wasn't sure what Erza's main goal was with these walks, but she didn't seem to be achieving it yet. He could only assume that she was attempting to jog Gray's memory or trying to talk to him and reestablish their relationship, but he couldn't say for sure.

Sometimes someone else would also offer to take Gray out, either just for a stroll around the city or to a certain place to see or do something. Gray had consented to walk with Lucy and Juvia one afternoon, and had even gone out with Lyon the day after, although the older mage hadn't been clear on what exactly they had been doing. Natsu always itched to go with them, but held himself back. He had decided that he would join on these daytrips occasionally, but he also wanted Gray to spend time with the others without the dragon slayer around. The ice mage had become too dependent on Natsu, and that would have to change eventually.

Not being with Gray on those walks and excursions chafed at Natsu, but at the same time it was nice to have an hour where he could just laugh and joke around like normal. And Gray's walking, although still a little stiff, had been improving steadily thanks to the daily jaunts. Natsu couldn't argue with those results.

Gray had also been improving in other ways as well. Although he still wasn't particularly talkative, the ice mage was a little more willing to offer responses, and sometimes his momentary hesitations before speaking or following a request were less pronounced. And even though he still didn't seem particularly interested in most of the guild members, he was slowly becoming less skittish around Lyon, Juvia, and Meredy. Natsu could tell that he was still uncomfortable around them, but the ice mage was getting better at not physically reacting when the 'screamers' came too close to him or tried to engage him in conversation. He had also abandoned some of his reluctance to eat and had begun eating slightly larger portions without complaint, which made Natsu's life much easier. They weren't big improvements, but they were definitely a step in the right direction.

Even better, everyone had toned down their inquiries into Natsu's caretaking skills and Gray's well-being. Generally, Gray's morning walk was the window of time in which such inquiries and concerned questions about improvements or details of the night would be asked. Now that Lyon had stopped being as aggressive and had decided to limit the number of questions he asked, Natsu found him much easier to deal with. The dragon slayer didn't mind giving everyone a rundown of what had been going on or answering a few questions. He did, after all, understand that the others were just concerned about Gray's well-being and eager to know if the ice mage had made any breakthroughs. Now that their way of asking had gone from an interrogation to more of a subdued questioning, Natsu could handle it.

All in all, things were going alright.

And then Porlyusica came back.

It wasn't like Natsu had  _forgotten_ that she had said she would be back in a few days to check on Gray again, not really. But all the same, he was startled when the sour-faced woman walked into the guild hall one afternoon.

"Well, let's take a look," she said by way of greeting, fixing Natsu with a disapproving stare.

Natsu grimaced slightly, wishing she wasn't singling him out already. It really didn't bode well for him. Luckily, she immediately focused on Gray and wasted no time getting down to business. Natsu watched her examine Gray and occasionally answered her sharp questions since the ice mage still wasn't terribly helpful. At first Natsu thought it was his imagination, but after watching Porlyusica work for several minutes, he came to the conclusion that she was being unusually… _gentle_ with Gray. She still snapped at everyone else, but she wasn't nearly so waspish with the ice mage and she seemed to be taking pains not to make him feel too uncomfortable with excessive prodding. It was a little odd to watch, but Natsu supposed that she must still be remembering how she had been unable to help Gray back when he had 'died'.

When she finally finished her thorough examination of the ice mage, she turned her attention to Natsu. He had been expecting her to give them an opinion on Gray's condition and then leave, but he wasn't so lucky. Instead, she began rapidly firing questions at him, asking him all sorts of details about the medicines she had left him last time. She wanted him to be able to repeat back all their names and uses and dosages and instructions for consumption. And she wasn't half as patient with Natsu as she was with Gray.

The dragon slayer stumbled through the questions awkwardly, feeling like he was being subjected to a pop quiz that he was in no way prepared for. Luckily he had remembered most of the more important details, but he had mixed up some of the minor ones and Porlyusica showed him no mercy. Natsu frantically scribbled down all of her irritated corrections on scraps of paper so that he'd have them on hand this time. Well, at least he wouldn't need all of those question marks on the potion labels anymore. He wished he had thought to just write everything down the first time around, but he had never been much of a writer and the thought hadn't even occurred to him at the time.

When she finally tired of berating Natsu for his incompetence, a disgruntled Porlyusica finally left him alone in order to give her diagnosis and answer any questions.

"His movements are much better than they were last time I saw him," she remarked, her voice as irritated as usual since she wasn't addressing Gray. "They're recovering nicely, and hopefully that means that he's strengthening some of his muscles again. Make sure you keep him up and moving to continue that improvement.

"His breathing is better as well. It's still rather shallow, but it's not nearly as bad as last time. I don't think it has anything to do with blood in his lungs anymore because I couldn't find any traces of extra liquid in his lungs, but I think it's become a habit at this point. He has been breathing shallowly ever since he came back, and it's become the new normal for him. I suggest that you administer some sort of breathing exercise to him, where you make him breathe deeply for a portion of every day. Even better, get him active. Anything to normalize his breathing. Breathing too shallowly isn't healthy and could weaken his lungs.

"Other than that, I don't see anything physically wrong with him. I'll still keep giving him checkups to monitor his progress and make sure he doesn't relapse, but so far he is recovering nicely. I'll come back in a week, week and a half, to check on him again."

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief at the good news, even Natsu, who had been closely monitoring Gray and was already pretty aware of most of these improvements. Just hearing an experienced healer give Gray the all-clear was reassuring.

"Is there anything we should keep an eye out for?" Erza asked, determined not to be lulled into a false sense of security.

"Anything reminiscent of what the curse did to him originally," Porlyusica snapped irritably. "You'd notice seizures, but also keep an eye out for any sort of trembling of the hands or body, as that might be an early warning sign. You also don't want to see any rapid or extreme temperature fluctuations. I couldn't find any sign of remaining blood in his lungs, so if he starts coughing up more, that could be a major problem. That could be foreshadowed by a resurgence of his breathing abnormalities. Keep him active and encourage deeper breathing, then you should notice if his breathing becomes unusually shallow again. Of course, he could contract any number of problems we haven't anticipated. If you notice anything out of the ordinary that seems like it could be a warning sign, send for me immediately. Now, can I go now?"

"Just one more thing," Natsu said hurriedly. He instantly wilted as Porlyusica turned her scathing glare back to him again, but he rallied valiantly so that he could ask his question. "We've been being pretty…gentle with Gray since he came back, until we made sure that he didn't have any more physical problems, but you're basically giving him an okay, right? Like, we weren't going to start trying to reteach him magic yet because that can take a toll on the body, but he should be able to handle that now, right?"

Porlyusica studied Gray thoughtfully for a moment as the ice mage watched the conversation without any apparent sign of interest or attentiveness. Then she looked back and Natsu and nodded slowly.

"Yes, he should be physically fit enough to start working with his magic again. And like I said, you should find him some exercises to get his heartrate up and his breathing deeper. I suggest that you start slow and work your way up to more physically demanding tasks though. If you try starting him off at a high level of difficulty, you might shock his system since his body isn't used to it anymore. And if you're going to be encouraging him to do any kind of rigorous activity, keep a very close eye on him to make sure that no warning signs appear."

Everyone nodded in understanding. Natsu frowned faintly. He knew that Porlyusica wasn't saying that physical exertion was bad for Gray—and in fact she had said it should be  _good_ —but he also realized why she was giving them this warning. If Gray  _did_ still have some kind of underlying condition, too much activity too fast could make it worse. If there were any problems, they would be more likely to come to light when Gray was placed under physically demanding circumstances. It didn't make Natsu want to prevent Gray from being active, but it did make him want to keep a careful eye on his friend.

" _Now_ can I leave?" Porlyusica demanded in annoyed exasperation.

Not wanting to aggravate her further, Natsu hurried to reassure her. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead," he said hastily.

She cast him another baleful look. "About time. I'm ready to get away from all you stupid humans."

She swept out the door without any further commentary, and Natsu let out a sigh of relief. He was glad that she hadn't felt the need to chew him out again before leaving. She could be scary when she was more annoyed than usual.

Gathering up all the scraps of paper he had copied her instructions onto, he glanced over them and frowned a little. He had been in such a frantic hurry to jot everything down that his normally messy scrawl had worsened to the point of becoming nearly illegible. He shrugged it off, figuring that he would address that problem when it arose. Surely it couldn't be  _that_ hard to decipher his own handwriting. Shoving the papers into his pocket, Natsu turned back to the others, who had started talking as soon as the doors had closed behind Porlyusica.

"Did you hear that, Lyon?" Meredy asked, her eyes gleaming with excitement. "She said that you can start working with Gray on his magic!"

Lyon snorted derisively. "You really think I'm going to teach him molding magic with how unsteady his movements are?" He shook his head at the apparent shortsightedness of the other wizards. "No, that will have to improve first."

"But his movements are better," Lucy ventured hesitantly, unsure of why Lyon was turning down the opportunity to mentor Gray when he clearly wanted to work with his adoptive brother. "Porlyusica said so. And you can tell just by the way he walks."

Lyon was already shaking his head before she had even finished speaking.

"It's not the walking that's the problem," he explained. "I mean, of course it's a good idea that his overall body movements are coordinated, so those improvements are definitely a plus. But the problem here is that he's still very awkward with his hands. Have you watched him trying to eat with a fork? He's better than he was, but he's still having problems with it. How am I supposed to teach him his magic when he has so much trouble manipulating small objects? Molding magic is all about the hands."

Natsu frowned in confusion, not quite understanding what the problem was.

"How hard can it be?" he asked optimistically. "You just kinda wave your hands around and then boom! You make icy things."

Not even the recent truce between the two mages could protect Natsu from Lyon's intense scorn. The older ice mage gave the dragon slayer a half-disbelieving, half-contemptuous look. Natsu shifted uncomfortably. He didn't like how Lyon was looking at him as if he had just said something incredibly stupid.

"You've known Gray for  _how_ long, exactly?" Lyon asked, shaking his head in scathing disbelief. "You really think our magic is that simple? Oh no. Molding magic is very exact and precise, and Gray always had some of the cleanest molding I've ever seen." He scowled a little. "Not to say that he was stronger than me of course, but he was very precise.

"Molding magic depends a lot on form. It requires all the other types of magic prep that you need to learn other magics, but it also has a very strong component of posture and form. Shaky hands or uncoordinated movements can make the magic sloppy and weak. Having steady hands and being able to make very precise, clean gestures is key for ice make." He snorted again. "Just 'wave our hands around' indeed."

Natsu frowned thoughtfully as he considered that. He had never really considered Gray's magic to be all that difficult or complex to master. Gray had, after all, always made it look very easy. But Natsu supposed that just because something looked easy didn't mean that it actually was. He looked over at Gray with a little more respect, but the ice mage didn't seem overly interested in their conversation, although he was at least watching them.

"Well, okay then," Natsu conceded. "We'll just get him to practice until he has better control over his hand motions, and then you can reteach him his magic."

"Easier said than done," Levy remarked. "I suppose we'll have to find him a task that will improve his ability to manipulate small objects with his hands. Now the question is, what task?"

"If I may make a suggestion," Lyon cut in sourly, obviously still ruffled from Natsu's earlier faux pas. Everyone returned their attention back to him. "We'll make him write."

The older ice mage crossed his arms across his chest and looked unbearably smug as everyone looked at him in confusion. He watched them with that smug sense of satisfaction until Lucy decided to ask the question he had been waiting to hear.

"Writing? I mean, I guess that using a pencil would count as manipulating a small object, but is there some particular reason you recommend it?" she asked curiously.

"Well, I'm glad you asked," Lyon said. Natsu rolled his eyes, but Lyon quickly sobered, his arrogance and earlier contempt melting away as he quickly and efficiently laid out his logic. "Writing requires a good deal of coordination, precise movements, and thought. It's a good combination of skills that is also relevant to molding magic. The other good thing about it is that we'll get to see tangible results.

"It's like how when children first learn to write, their handwriting tends to be very messy. If Gray's movements are awkward or uncoordinated, we'll be able to see it in his handwriting. It's kind of like how he always had very neat handwriting because of how used to making precise gestures he was, due to his magic. Given how awkwardly he handles a fork, it's a safe bet that his handwriting is going to start off pretty sloppy because of what a hard time he'll have properly controlling the pencil. When his handwriting gets really neat again, it'll show that he's able to control and manipulate the pencil again, which means that he'll have better control over his hand movements. At that point, I'll just have to reteach him the proper gestures for ice make, since he'll already have the motor ability to perform them."

There was a murmur of agreement from the assembled mages. Natsu had to admit that the idea was rather clever in its simplicity. Having actual physical proof of Gray's progress would be helpful in determining when the ice mage was ready to move on to real magic lessons. It would also be useful to have a standard to set Gray's progress against.

Natsu was, in fact, familiar with the old Gray's handwriting, so they could compare Gray's current writing with his previous style. Although they might want to set the bar a  _little_ lower. Lyon hadn't been kidding when he said that Gray's script had been impeccably neat. Gray had possibly the neatest handwriting out of anyone Natsu knew, girls included. If they waited for this new Gray to reach that level of precision, they'd probably be waiting for quite a while.

"Okay, that's a great idea," Erza told Lyon, giving him an approving look. "Now we just need to find something for him to write."

"He won't be very good at just writing whatever comes to his head," Natsu warned them. "You know how he doesn't initiate much action or speech on his own. And honestly, I'm not sure if his thoughts follow normal patterns either. If you ask him to write whatever he wants to, he'll probably just stare at the paper because he won't come up with anything to write. It would be better if we could just find him something to copy, for now at least."

That wasn't a terribly encouraging thought, but it was one that needed to be voiced. There were a few quick, disheartened looks directed towards Gray, but everyone swiftly returned to the matter at hand.

"Here," Gajeel growled.

The iron dragon slayer had moved across the room and ripped a request off the job board. He stomped back across the floor to where the others were gathered, and brusquely shoved the piece of paper into Natsu's hands. Natsu blinked down at the request uncomprehendingly for a moment, before looking back up at Gajeel. Gajeel scowled and looked away in something resembling embarrassment.

"He can copy that."

Natsu glanced back down at the paper, noticing that Gajeel had picked a request that had a good bit of writing on it. A small grin tugged at the corners of his lips as he regarded the other dragon slayer. Gajeel had been a pain in the neck throughout most of this process, so it was nice to see that he cared more than he let on, even if he wasn't going to admit it.

"Thanks," Natsu told him.

Gajeel just made a dismissive sound and moved to stand by Juvia and Levy again.

"I found some paper and a pencil!" Mira exclaimed, hurrying out of the backroom and waving her treasures in the air excitedly. She headed straight for Gray and laid the supplies on the table in front of him. He stared at them blankly as she beamed at him.

"Thanks, Mira," Natsu said as he moved to join them.

Setting the flyer on the table next to Mira's offering, he tapped it with his finger to draw Gray's attention to it. He opened his mouth to give his friend step-by-step instructions, but changed his mind at the last minute. He had wanted Gray to become a little more independent and self-motivated, hadn't he? Maybe it was better if he gave his friend a chance to think for himself for a bit.

"You were listening to our discussion, right?" he asked.

Gray looked at Natsu with those dark, unreadable eyes and nodded slowly.

"So tell me, what is it that I'm about to ask you to do?"

Gray shrugged apathetically, and Natsu scowled.

"Tell me," the dragon slayer pressed.

Gray sighed lightly, and for a split second Natsu got the impression that he was going to roll his eyes. But the moment passed like it had never been at all, because Gray no longer did such trivial things since he apparently had no more emotions to display.

"You want me to copy the words from this paper to blank sheets of paper," the ice mage said in a monotone. "Presumably you want me to continue copying them over and over again until you're satisfied."

Natsu stared at him wordlessly, not sure if he should be pleased that Gray had been listening and thinking on his own or unhappy that it seemed to offer no improvement to the problem at large. He settled for being disappointed for some nebulous reason he couldn't quite put his finger on.

"Yeah," he said with a sigh. "Go ahead and work on that."

"Okay," Gray said flatly.

The ice mage began struggling with his task. Everyone crowded around to see the initial results, although they had enough tact to maintain a little distance. Not that that seemed to matter very much at the moment. Gray seemed wholly oblivious to their presence, and Natsu marveled at how immediately absorbed he had become in such a simple task. Given Gray's lack of interest in most everything, it was unusual to see him become so engrossed in something.

Everyone watched with bated breath as Gray fumbled around with the pencil and awkwardly tried to write. The results were rather disappointing. It looked a little like a small child, trying out writing for the first time, had picked up a pencil and slashed it across the paper in a jumbled array of jagged slashes and wobbly lines. The words were hardly legible, and the messy scrawl looked nothing like Gray's normally neat script.

Natsu let out a disappointed breath. It's not like he had been expecting to see Gray's familiar handwriting again right away, but he felt a little deflated nonetheless. He silently watched his friend's technique. Gray didn't seem bothered by how terrible his writing was, but he  _had_  assumed an air of determined concentration that puzzled the dragon slayer. The drive was there—which was impressive, since Gray rarely felt motivated to do anything anymore—but the execution was sorely lacking.

Natsu hadn't realized exactly how hard a time Gray had controlling his finer movements. He had been aware that the ice mage still had some difficulty eating with a fork and that he had an unfortunate tendency to drop a lot of things that he picked up, but Gray had seemed to be improving over the last few days. Natsu wondered if it was just because Gray had gotten used to the repetitive motion of using utensils but hadn't really practiced doing any other tasks that required good hand-eye coordination and controlled movements. Although Gray could now wield a fork reasonably well, he kept fumbling around with the pencil and was holding it clumsily.

"Here, hold it like this," Erza instructed, snatching the pencil out of Gray's hand and demonstrating the proper way to hold it.

Gray watched her blankly, but Natsu almost thought that he could see a faint glimmer of irritation in those dark eyes. But he had probably imagined it, because he doubted Gray was really that annoyed at being interrupted, especially given his current emotional flatness.

Finished with her demonstration, Erza carefully slid the pencil back into Gray's hand. The ice mage's fingers curled around it awkwardly, and Erza shook her head slightly. She gently adjusted his fingers so that he had a better grip on it.

"Try now," she said quietly.

Gray looked between her and the pencil for a second, but then shrugged and started writing again. Every time his fingers slipped out of position or he lost his grip, Erza would patiently correct his hold.

"Huh, who would've known that Erza would be a good teacher?" Natsu muttered, keeping his voice low enough that the requip mage couldn't hear him.

Lucy shot him an amused look. "Just because she couldn't teach you and Gray manners…"

Natsu rolled his eyes and gave a long-suffering sigh. "The things I have to put up with," he said to Lyon, who was standing beside him.

The older ice mage gave him a flat look, but a hint of amusement lingered in his eyes. "I think I feel more sorry for everyone who has to put up with  _you_ ," he said dryly.

Natsu snorted but didn't deign to respond. Instead, he leaned forward a little to take a look at Gray's progress. He was rather impressed, despite himself. Erza's tutoring had made a tremendous impact on the ice mage's writing. Gray's writing was still messy and wobbly and he still had some difficulty maneuvering the pencil into the proper positions, but the writing itself was actually legible. It was nowhere near the level of Gray's pre-curse writing, but it was definitely an improvement.

"Wow, that actually helped a lot," Natsu said with a low whistle.

Gray glanced up at him and then studied Erza for a moment. "Yes. It's easier this way."

He returned his concentration to the paper, leaving Erza looking a little flushed and pleased. That was, after all, about the closest thing to a thank you that could be expected of Gray these days.

Seeing that Gray was busy and completely uninterested in anything besides his copying, people started to drift away and the normal hum of noise and conversation returned to the guild hall. Soon it was just Natsu, Lyon, Juvia, Lucy, and Erza who remained clustered around Gray, and they slowly migrated to sitting at the table around the ice mage. Erza still made occasional corrections to Gray's hand positioning, and the others watched absently as they talked.

"Hopefully Gray-sama will improve quickly so that Lyon-san can teach him his magic again soon," Juvia said optimistically.

"He's very…interested in the copying," Lucy pointed out slowly. "He's actually being pretty intense about it. It's weird. But maybe it means that he'll get the hang of it quickly."

Natsu bit his tongue to stop himself from reminding them that Gray was technically sitting right next to them and could hear everything they said. Since the ice mage was so quiet and unresponsive these days, it was easy to forget that he was there and listening. Natsu fell into that trap himself quite frequently. Still, it was sometimes hard to tell whether or not Gray was actually paying attention to them. His disinterest made it seem likely that he wasn't always really listening, but it was impossible to tell when his eyes didn't give anything away.

Natsu briefly wondered whether Gray was paying attention to them now. He seemed pretty oblivious to outside distractions because he was focused so intently on his writing, but Natsu couldn't say for sure.

"Teaching him his magic again will be real progress," Erza agreed with a satisfied nod.

Lyon scowled and looked less than pleased. Natsu raised an eyebrow. He had thought the older ice mage would be excited about this opportunity to interact with Gray. He wasn't sure what was bothering Lyon about it.

"What?" Natsu asked him.

Lyon shook his head and looked away, his brow furrowed. "That's great and all, but I shouldn't  _have_ to teach him his magic again. That's such a fundamental part of who he is. He should be able to use it. He should—" Lyon broke off and sighed.

"We'll get him to remember eventually, but until then we're going to do what we can," Erza said firmly, her face set in determined lines.

"Shouldn't we be trying to restore his memories instead of trying to teach him magic?" Lyon asked unhappily.

"We're waiting for Sting and Rogue to bring Rufus back," Lucy reminded him.

"I know, I know," Lyon answered, waving a hand dismissively. "But what about Meredy? Why don't we try using her magic while we wait?"

Natsu watched Gray scribbling away furiously for a moment before looking back up to fix Lyon with a dead stare.

"Because it didn't work last time," he said flatly.

Lyon looked confused for a moment, before making the connection.

"Back when you were trying to get Gray out of the void?" he asked, frowning slightly as he tried to dredge up all the details of that occasion since he hadn't been there to see it for himself. "But you got him back, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but it didn't make Gray remember anything," Natsu replied, resting his elbow on the table and propping his head in his hand as his gaze drifted back to Gray. "He says that it didn't even make him feel anything, that the only thing that dragged him back was that I could feel for him while we were linked. If that's true then it's a miracle we got him back in the first place."

"But couldn't we still try again?" Lyon asked uncertainly. "It's better than nothing."

"If Rufus's magic doesn't work then we'll try Meredy's again," Erza said quietly.

"But why—?"

"Because Meredy-san was very upset over what happened last time," Juvia interrupted, looking over sadly at her pink-haired friend who was talking animatedly to Jellal several tables away.

"But wasn't that just because she thought that she lost Natsu?" Lyon asked.

"Yes, but she's already primed for disappointment," Erza replied. "She's still shaken up over that. Simply failing to restore Gray's memories might not be as damaging as almost losing Natsu, but since she's still so upset, she would take it hard. Better to let Rufus try first."

Understanding flickered in Lyon's eyes and he stopped asking questions. The conversation moved on to lighter topics, and no one brought up Gray's memory deficiency for a while.

Throughout the rest of the day, Gray continued to scribble away, his interest in the task never wavering. When Natsu had interrupted him to make him eat, the ice mage had been strangely reluctant to abandon his pencil, and looked distinctly irritated for a few seconds. It was odd behavior, but Natsu decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Gray's handwriting was still nowhere near its original caliber by the time Natsu declared that they should head to the apartment, but it was a vast improvement over how it had started off.

Dragging Gray away from his writing, Natsu said goodnight to his guildmates and took Gray back to his apartment. He left the ice mage sitting at the table while he sorted out all the new potion labels and prepared the right dosages of medicine for Gray. Scowling at his hasty scrawl as if that would help him decipher it better, he painstakingly matched the labels to bottles with some difficulty. He recognized the bottles of the medicines he had been giving to Gray before bed each night, but he squinted at the new and improved labels to double check the instructions. It was no easy feat, considering how illegible his writing was.

He looked up to give Gray his medicine, but paused. The ice mage had started copying that damn job request again—Natsu should really find him more interesting things to copy—as soon as he had sat down at the table, but now he was watching Natsu, pencil poised above the paper. There was a faintly amused expression on his face as he watched Natsu squinting at the poorly-written labels and cursing softly at how difficult it was.

"Think it's funny, huh?" Natsu asked dryly, glad to see a hint of emotion on his friend's face.

Gray shrugged and the sly smirk slid off his face. As his normal apathetic expression returned, Natsu grimaced and wished that he hadn't brought Gray's attention to his mood. The ice mage always seemed to lose whatever he might be feeling the second anyone pointed it out to him.

With a sigh, Natsu gave Gray his medicine and sent him off to bed. Then the dragon slayer perused the bookshelves in the living area and picked a book at random, deciding that perhaps Gray would find it more interesting to copy than a job request with only a few words on it.

Gray never commented on whether or not he preferred the book, but over the next few days it became a common sight to see the ice mage carrying it around with a sheaf of papers folded into it, a pencil in his hand. His interest in writing didn't fade, and he spent a good deal of his spare time diligently copying pages out of the book, only stopping when Natsu or another guild member insisted that he take a break and do something else. It was baffling behavior, but it did have its perks. Gray's handwriting became steadily neater as the days wore on, and Natsu noticed that it also correlated with an improvement on how he handled forks and other small objects.

For the first day or two Natsu checked Gray's progress almost constantly, but he eventually mellowed out and calmed down, rarely bothering to pay attention to the state his friend's writing. He'd check every day or so to see how Gray was doing, and had come to the conclusion that Lyon would be satisfied soon.

A few days after Gray's sudden obsession with writing, Natsu woke up to the sound of the shower running. He sat up groggily and looked towards the bathroom. Gray didn't normally initiate much action on his own anymore and preferred to sleep until Natsu woke him up, so it was a little surprising that he had gone ahead and started getting ready without Natsu directing him to. It was also encouraging, and Natsu decided that it was a good way to start the day.

Smiling to himself, he headed into the kitchen to get breakfast started. The shower turned off, and Natsu moved to the part of the counter that had been devoted to housing the selection of medicines Porlyusica had left. He might as well get Gray's morning doses ready for him.

By this point he had mostly memorized all the main instructions for each potion, but he still looked to the labels out of habit, and so that he could double check himself since he had an unfortunate tendency to forget things. He prepared himself for the daily chore of painstakingly decoding his illegible scrawl, but instead did a double take and stared downwards in surprise.

It wasn't his messy writing that was scrawled across the labels. The labels had all been rewritten, the information printed neatly across them in an achingly familiar script. Natsu's breath caught and he looked back towards the bathroom again. Gray must have rewritten the labels this morning while Natsu was still asleep. And he had done a damn good job. The letters weren't shaky or uneven at all. They were impeccably neat and precise, laid across the paper in perfectly straight lines of script even though the pages were unlined.

Natsu felt a grin tugging at his lips. This was the old Gray's writing, no doubt about it. He rather thought that Lyon would want to hear about this.

* * *

"I think he's ready!" Natsu announced loudly as he tugged Gray into the guild hall an hour later.

Everyone looked over, and there were a few puzzled glances thrown his way.

"For what?" Lucy asked uncertainly. Then her eye caught on the book tucked underneath Gray's arm. "Oh, you mean that his writing is good enough now?"

"Yup," Natsu said cheerfully. "Show them, Gray."

The ice mage hesitated for a moment before shrugging and sitting down at a nearby table to silently copy out a few lines from his ever-present book. Everyone gathered around to see what Natsu was so excited about, but it was Lyon that the dragon slayer focused on. The older ice mage watched Gray write with an unreadable expression, his arms crossed as he studied the writing critically. Natsu waited impatiently for his judgement.

"It really looks exactly like his old handwriting, doesn't it?" Lyon said finally, a hint of wistfulness tinging his voice.

Natsu smiled. "Yes. Yes it does."

"Will you start giving him magic lessons then?" Lucy asked.

Lyon nodded, but it was Erza who spoke up first.

"You are more than welcome to work with Gray on his magic  _after_ I take him out on his morning walk," she said firmly.

Lyon rolled his eyes but didn't protest as Erza pulled a reluctant Gray away from his obsessive writing. Natsu watched them with slightly narrowed eyes.

"I think I'll come with you," he said. He wanted to see what Erza was up to with Gray on these walks of theirs.

The requip mage looked like she might disagree for a moment, but then she just shrugged and headed for the door, Gray following at her heels.

"Come if you want," she replied dismissively.

The three friends left the guild hall and paused as they emerged onto the street beyond. Gray turned to Erza and spoke first, which surprised Natsu a little.

"Where are we going first today?" the ice mage asked in a monotone.

Natsu felt his eyebrows inching upwards, but Erza just turned the question over thoughtfully for a few seconds before responding.

"How about we go to the cake shop first?" she suggested.

Gray shrugged and began walking again. Natsu blinked after him in shock before hurrying after him. Erza walked next to Gray, but she wasn't giving him any directions. The ice mage was the one who was choosing the path, and he didn't seem confused about where he was going. It was a little strange to see since it was usually Gray who was following everyone else around. This time he was in the lead.

"You feed him cake first thing in the morning?" Natsu asked as he slowed to a walk beside Erza.

The requip mage gave him an amused look and shook her head. "No, the cake shop is just one of the places I use as a landmark for him. I've been showing him around the city and making him memorize where different things are. Then I have him practice on these walks to make sure that he still remembers. If nothing else, he'll at least know how to get around the city."

Natsu regarded her with a newfound respect. "That's actually a good idea. At least he won't be getting lost. I suppose it hasn't helped trigger any memories though?"

Erza's expression darkened slightly and she looked away. "If it had, I would have told you all right away."

Natsu nodded to himself, recognizing the truth in that statement. Then he drew up short as Gray stopped abruptly. Looking up, he realized that they had reached Erza's favorite bakery.

"Now where?" Gray asked flatly.

"Where do  _you_ want to go?" Erza asked him shrewdly.

Gray shrugged. "I don't know."

Natsu wanted to tell Erza that she wasn't going to get anywhere with Gray by taking that route, but he held his tongue. He did realize what she was trying to do, after all. It was the same thing Natsu was doing when he tried to get Gray to give an opinion on what he wanted to eat for dinner or what he wanted to talk about. Gray would follow directions, but he still didn't care enough to offer his own opinions or make his own decisions.

"Just pick a place," she pressed. "Any place."

Gray stayed silent for a moment before evidently realizing that she wasn't going to back down. He sighed and seemed to consider it.

"The park?" he suggested finally.

Erza beamed at him and even Natsu smiled a little. If nothing else, at least Gray had actually chosen a place to go.

"Sounds good," Erza said cheerfully. "Lead the way, Gray."

Gray shrugged again and started walking towards the park as the other two mages tried to engage him in conversation.

"So, how are you feeling today, Natsu?" Erza asked.

Natsu gave her a funny look. "I'm doing well, thanks. You?"

"Oh, I'm great," she replied. "How about you, Gray? How are you feeling?"

Ah, that would explain it. Erza was trying to use Natsu as an example for how Gray should be conversing with them. It wasn't a bad idea. Natsu had to admit that the guild hadn't been all that good at figuring out how to get Gray to talk to them, and it was easy to slip into their own conversations without including him since he was so quiet now. They'd have to work on that, because they should really be trying harder to get Gray talking.

"…Fine," Gray said after a pause.

Erza was not going to be deterred by his lackluster response.

"Are you excited to start learning magic today?" she asked cheerfully.

"Not particularly."

Erza frowned slightly but didn't look surprised. Gray had a well-established habit of denying that he felt much of anything.

"Learning magic is fun, isn't it, Natsu?"

"Oh yeah," Natsu answered, jumping back into the conversation. "You should have a good time, Gray."

"Hm."

Erza and Natsu spent several more minutes trying to get Gray interested in their conversation, but only managed to elicit terse replies for the most part. Natsu sighed.

"Is this what you do on these walks? Try to get him to talk to you?" he asked Erza.

"More or less," she replied, watching Gray with mild disappointment. "Some days are better than others. Sometimes I can actually get him to use full sentences and everything, but most days he's like this."

Natsu nodded. He could relate to that. He sometimes tried to talk to Gray in the mornings and evenings at the apartment with varied results.

"Where are we going now?" Gray interrupted.

Erza gave him a calculating look. "We could walk by the girls' dorm," she suggested.

He stared at her blankly. "I don't know where that is."

Natsu looked between them with a small frown.

"He forgot where it is?" he asked. Then he thought about how often he tested Gray with things he didn't know in the hopes that the some part of the ice mage would be able to detect the right answer from what he had known before the void had taken it all. "Oh, you never took him there, did you?" he said with new understanding. "You're just testing him."

Erza sighed and nodded. "Well, might as well swing by there so he knows where it is for next time," she said, striving for optimism.

She started walking toward Fairy Hills, the boys following after her. Gray seemed to lose whatever interest he had had in the conversation once he realized that Erza was no longer calling on him to make decisions or find his own way. Instead, he contented himself with trailing after her obediently. Natsu got the feeling that they weren't going to get much more out of him at this point.

"Have you been talking to Jellal lately?" the dragon slayer asked Erza as they walked.

She shrugged. "Yeah, I have. But I've also been pretty preoccupied with this whole situation with Gray, so maybe not as much as you'd expect."

"Has he told you anything interesting?" Natsu asked, trying to come up with something to keep the conversation going.

"Hm…Well, he's been telling me about some of Crime Sorcière's activities and missions, I suppose. I guess the other members—the old Oración Seis—have been trying to convince him and Meredy to go back because they found another dark guild to root out."

"Should we expect them to bail soon then?"

"He says that he wants to stay until Sabertooth comes back. They want to see if Rufus's magic helps, and if it doesn't then Meredy wants to try again before they go," she explained.

Natsu nodded his understanding but didn't reply since they had reached Fairy Hills and Erza became distracted pointing it out to Gray. He had to wonder what exactly Erza's reasoning had been behind choosing this particular place to test Gray, considering that the new Fairy Hills was in a different location than the old one since the guild had had to acquire a new structure once they started rebuilding. Maybe that had just slipped her mind, but that didn't sound like Erza—she usually took things like that into consideration. Perhaps she had been half-hoping that Gray would lead them to the old location, since he would have known where that was.

Regardless of Erza's thought process, the requip mage decided that they had had enough for today. It was cutting the walk a little short, but Natsu suspected that she might be eager to get back so that Gray could get his magic lesson. The three mages walked back to the guild in companionable silence, and were accosted as soon as they walked in the door.

"Oh great!" Lucy gushed excitedly. "Lyon is waiting for you out back, behind the guild. He's ready to start teaching Gray some of the basics."

There was a flurry of activity as Natsu, Gray, and Erza were impatiently ushered through the building and out the back, followed by the other guild members, who were eager to see how this first magic lesson would go. Like Lucy had said, Lyon was waiting behind the building, his brow furrowed in concentration as he paced back and forth and muttered to himself under his breath. Natsu could only assume that his intense concentration was linked to his attempts to puzzle out the best way to go about teaching ice make magic from scratch.

As soon as he spotted Gray and the others, Lyon stalked over and began immediately giving the younger ice mage instructions. Gray still eyed him warily and would sometimes inch away if he got too close, but he also followed all of Lyon's directions and didn't voice any opposition to the older mage teaching him. Natsu decided to take that as a good sign.

On the other hand, it quickly became apparent that Gray had little interest in the lesson and was just going through the motions. By the time a frustrated Lyon called it quits two hours later, nothing major had been accomplished. Natsu thought that perhaps Gray had at least memorized some of the gestures and tips Lyon was showing or telling him, but not so much as a particle of ice had been produced by the end of the lesson.

"I don't know that he's ready for this," Lyon told Natsu, his voice thick with frustration and disappointment as he stared at Gray. "Sure, he can copy the movements I show him, but it's all so…soulless. He doesn't care about using magic, so he isn't really capable of it. This level of failure…it's ridiculous. He learned much faster than this the first time around.

"But you know, he also had the most passion to learn out of anyone I'd ever met when he was a kid, so he had the dedication to pick up all the lessons pretty quickly. He was clever, and also ridiculously determined because he wanted to get stronger so that he could get his revenge on Deliora. It might have been a stupid goal to strive towards, but at least it gave him the motivation and drive he needed. Now? Now he's just so empty and uncaring. I don't know how to teach him anything when he doesn't want to learn."

Natsu sighed as he watched the equally disappointed guild members guiding Gray back inside the building after the failed first attempt to teach him magic. The dragon slayer stood with Lyon just outside the hall as everyone else disappeared inside.

"There's not much else we can do but keep trying," Natsu said tiredly. "I was getting so hopeful because in some ways he seems to have been improving these last few days. His health is better, he's eating more normally, his breathing is better, he sometimes initiates things on his own, he's started warming up to you and the others a bit. But even with all that…

"I mean, there have been a couple times when he'll look annoyed or amused for a few seconds, but if you ever point it out to him then he just looks at you like you're crazy and any emotion he might have been feeling disappears. And honestly, I think that's the biggest problem right now, even bigger than his amnesia. There was nothing to care about in the void, and he still doesn't understand why he should care about anything out here. Once we get him to start caring and he learns how to feel emotion again, I think that's when we'll start seeing some real progress."

Lyon grimaced. "Easier said than done," he pointed out pessimistically.

"I know," Natsu agreed.

"Well, we might as well head in."

Lyon started towards the door, where the others had disappeared shortly before. Natsu followed, a slight frown plastered across his face.

"Are you going to keep giving him lessons?" he asked the other man.

Lyon glanced back at him. "Of course. There's always the possibility that he'll make some progress or that something we cover will jog his memory. If nothing else, it might help him lose some of his wariness of me, and it'll make me feel useful."

"Good," Natsu said absently. "Just keep trying. That's all we can do now."

He had been very optimistic this morning when he had realized that Gray had taken the initiative to get ready and copy out the labels on his own, and seeing the ice mage navigate the streets with Erza had also been encouraging. But a good deal of that earlier hope had faded away.

Natsu had the feeling that they had just reached a dead end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And next chapter, something will actually happen. Finally. It should be fun, in a kind of angsty way.


	14. Ch 13-Natsu pushes Gray too far

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here's a fun chapter.

* * *

**Chapter 13**

_(In which Sabertooth comes to the rescue and Natsu pushes Gray too far.)_

* * *

In a way, Natsu was right. After the steady improvement of the first week or so, Gray seemed to plateau, making little progress one way or the other. On the one hand, he wasn't backsliding. On the other, all improvement had ground to a halt, and it was extremely discouraging.

Gray wasn't much more talkative than he had been, although some days were better than others. Presumably he was still broadening his knowledge of the city streets with Erza, but that learning didn't extend to more complex skills such as magic. Despite having a magic lesson with Lyon every day or two, he had yet to produce any kind of ice whatsoever. He had little to no interest in relearning his magic, which made Natsu wonder what had motivated him so much with his writing.

Because although everyone kept Gray busy with walks and exercises and magic lessons and attempted conversations, the ice mage could still occasionally be seen copying away, a book at his elbow and page after page of neat script piling up in a stack beside him. Natsu had tried asking him what he found so interesting about writing, but Gray hadn't been able to give him a satisfactory answer, either because he didn't feel like sharing or because he wasn't quite sure himself.

The disappointing lack of progress had everyone irritable and on edge, so it was with great relief and excitement that they greeted the Sabertooth mages when they finally walked back into Fairy Tail's guild hall a couple weeks after they had originally left. Natsu honestly hadn't been expecting them to sort out their problem with Magic Council so quickly, so he was taken by surprise when Sting, Rogue, and Rufus suddenly appeared.

"Oh! You're back!" Lucy exclaimed excitedly as she spotted the Sabertooth mages. "You cleared everything with the Council already?"

"What can I say? I'm pretty persuasive." Sting preened, grinning at everyone's obvious enthusiasm.

"The Council hates you," Rogue told him flatly, clearly not afraid to burst his bubble. "The only reason we bailed out Rufus and Orga so quickly was because I did some research and presented them with a whole load of legal arguments that would have given them quite the headache if they didn't give in."

Sting scowled over at his friend. "You always ruin my fun," he grumbled.

Rogue was unimpressed. "Your ego is big enough without you adding to it."

Natsu smirked a little. He missed having this kind of teasing banter with Gray. And like his playful arguments with Gray, he knew that Sting and Rogue could bicker back and forth forever unless someone stopped them. Luckily it was Rufus who still had his head on straight.

"You really did manage to get him back," the memory mage said with a low whistle as he caught sight of Gray sitting at a nearby table. Sensing that Rufus was talking about him, Gray glanced over at the newcomer and gave him a quick once-over before losing interest.

"Yeah, but there's still a lot of problems," Natsu cautioned. "I'm sure Sting and Rogue explained some of what was going on, at least everything that happened before they took off. We haven't been able to get him to remember anything at all, so we've been waiting for you."

Rufus had the grace to look a little embarrassed. "Ah, sorry about that," he apologized.

Natsu shrugged. He had been plenty irritated with the other man over the past couple weeks, but now that Rufus was standing here, Natsu was too relieved to be angry.

"Well, you're here now. Erza already took Gray walking, so we can go ahead and get started right away."

"Walking?" Sting asked with a slight frown. "What  _have_ we missed while we were gone?"

Natsu and the others took turns quickly filling in the Sabertooth mages about what had happened since Sting and Rogue had left, from Porlyusica's comments, to the walks, to Gray's lessons in writing and magic. It was just a rough sketch of the time they had missed, because everyone was eager to get started and didn't want to spend too long bogged down in the details.

After listening carefully to the rundown of Gray's behavior, Rufus asked a few questions about Gray's memory recovery and any progress in understanding his emotions and the emotions of others. There wasn't much good news to give him—those were the areas in which Gray had shown the least improvement.

"Alright," Rufus said, getting down to business once he was satisfied that he had heard enough. "We might as well get started, but there are a few things you should keep in mind. First of all, Gray currently has no memories of 'before', so all of the memories I use will have to come from you all. I suggest that we start with memories that, one, have a lot of meaning for both you and him, and two, are more recent. He's more likely to make a connection with memories that were within a couple years of his 'death'. And he might be more likely to remember something that had a lot of meaning to him or evoked a lot emotion."

Rufus looked a little uncertain about the last part, not reassured by everyone's insistence that Gray almost never showed emotion and didn't seem to really understand other people's emotions either. Natsu supposed that that might throw a wrench in their plans.

"What do you need us to do?" Lyon asked determinedly.

"Well…" Rufus considered his next words carefully. "You have to realize that what I do isn't some kind of miraculous memory revival. I can take your memories and bring them to life in the outside world, so to speak, but I can't just stick them in Gray's head for him. I can show him the things he's forgotten, but I can't necessarily make him remember them. He has to do that for himself."

Everyone nodded in understanding, but Natsu wondered if they really grasped the magnitude of what Rufus was trying to say. They were so eager to get started, so desperate to finally find a way to get Gray back to the way he had been before, that they seemed to be brushing aside the fact that this wasn't a failsafe plan. Logically they knew that there was a possibility that this wouldn't work, but Natsu wasn't sure that any of them really believed that it would fail. He realized ruefully that he was already convinced that it had to succeed as well.

Rufus still looked a little hesitant, as if he realized that they were expecting too much of him. In a sense he was their miracle worker, their savior, and they needed him to succeed where they had failed. It was a big responsibility.

"Okay then. I'll need you to tell me when you come up with a memory you want me to show him, and then you need to think about that memory," he instructed. "It will make it easier for me to find the one you want. And it would be great if only one person shouted out memories at a time, because I can only do so much. Once I get a lock on the memory in question, I can create images and scenes from it.

"Just remember that the only thing I have to work with is your memory, so if it's distorted in any way, that will be represented in my molding. A little distortion over time is normal and should be okay, but if there's too much of a difference between the way you remember and he remembered an event, it might make it harder for him to make a connection. That's another reason to start with more recent memories, because they should be less corrupted."

"Alright, I think we get it," Erza said, impatient to get started. "Who wants to go first?"

There was an immediate clamor and a chorus of "remember that time when…?", and all of Rufus's earlier pleas for them to go one at a time were instantly forgotten. The one thing that everyone  _did_ seem to remember was the suggestion that they start with some of the more recent memories.

So they started with events that had happened during and shortly before the fight with Tartaros, since it was both recent and important. It was kind of fascinating to see how the guild reconstructed that time, with different members volunteering their memories of any part of it they had been involved in with Gray. It was something of a patchwork, made up of different people's memories and missing big chunks of time where Gray had been on his own and no one knew for sure what had happened, but it was a fairly good representation of the days leading up to Tartaros and the showdown with the dark guild.

They'd managed to reconstruct everything up to the point where that Silver guy had dragged Gray away for a one-on-one fight, and everyone was trying to think about when exactly Gray had reappeared and who had seen him next. Natsu figured that after that blank gap was when Gray had interrupted the fight with the Sabertooth dragon slayers and Natsu against Mard Geer, so he volunteered his memory of that fight, starting from when Gray had first arrived.

If Natsu had been thinking more carefully he might have considered how that fight had eventually ended and remembered the consequences, but Natsu was Natsu, and thinking had never been his strong suit.

Natsu concentrated on remembering all the details of the fight, but it was really strange seeing how Rufus could peer into his memory and create scenes out of thin air. The dragon slayer occasionally got the feeling that some minor detail or other was just a little off, but he figured it was good enough. Gray hadn't shown much interest in any of the scenes playing out before him and this one was no different, but everyone else was suitably impressed.

It was all going well until they reached the point where Mard Geer was about to cast Memento Mori. Natsu felt the blood slowly drain from his face as he realized that he might have just made a terrible mistake. He had only thought of this fight because it fit in with the guild's reconstruction of the timeline and because it had the added bonus of being a good example of how close of friends Natsu and Gray were and how they used their magic. It had conveniently slipped his mind that this was also the starting point of this whole mess.

He didn't want to see this again.

"Stop," he rasped.

But Rufus didn't appear to hear him over everyone else's running commentary, and Natsu was too absorbed in watching the dreadful scene to repeat himself. Unable to tear his eyes away, he watched in morbid fascination as the pseudo-Mard Geer hit the replicas of him and Gray with Memento Mori, obscuring them from view. Everyone suddenly quieted as they all watched with bated breath.

"Oh shit," Laxus said into the stillness.

It seemed to echo how everyone else felt as well. They all seemed to share Natsu's horrified fascination now as they waited to see how exactly this event had played out. They had a good idea of the aftermath of course, but Natsu hadn't felt the need to share all the details of what had happened, so no one besides him, Gray, and a dead demon had seen this before. The scene seemed to fade into black for a few seconds since Natsu hadn't really been able to see anything outside of the curse's attack, but then it flickered back to life and everyone watched as the smoke cleared to reveal Gray standing protectively in front of Natsu in his half-demonized form, breathing heavily as he glared at Mard Geer defiantly.

And then he was falling, and Natsu really,  _really_ did not want to see this again. It had been bad enough the first time around. Watching Gray fall, worrying that he had just taken severe damage from a curse meant to kill immortals, had been terrible enough that it had managed to push Natsu into dragon force when it had first happened over a year ago. Now that Natsu knew that this marked the beginning of the end for his friend, it was even worse.

"Rufus," he ground out.

The other mage heard him this time and looked over, but was quickly distracted as pseudo-Natsu went into dragon force and launched an attack on Mard Geer.

"Damn, did you really go into dragon force just like that?" Gajeel asked with a low whistle, looking impressed despite himself.

"Oh no!" Lucy said, eyes wide as past-Natsu ran out of magic and was sent hurtling to the ground by Mard Geer.

Under normal circumstances Natsu might laugh at the fact that she seemed so worried even though she already knew that the dragon slayer would be alright, but he wasn't in a laughing mood.

"Rufus, seriously—" he tried, but his voice was lost in another flurry of excitement as everyone spotted memory-Gray staggering to his feet and summoning up his magic to take down the demon.

There were a few encouraging calls and whistles from the onlookers, and it made Natsu want to set something on fire. Didn't they realize that something was seriously wrong with Gray by now? Even Natsu had noticed by that point. He just hadn't realized how bad it was, and since Gray had stood up again, he had assumed it must not be too dangerous. He had been wrong.

"Aw," Lucy cooed as pseudo-Gray jolted across the space to catch Natsu's past self before he hit the ground. "Those two."

Not 'aw'. Not 'aw' at all. Natsu closed his eyes and dropped his head into his hands as he shook his head violently in a vain attempt to get rid of the memory so that Rufus couldn't keep playing it out. He tried to think about something else, but this memory had a terrible, morbidly captivating quality that prevented him from being able to let it go. The harder Natsu tried to distract himself, the harder it became to think about anything else.

"Natsu?" Happy asked suddenly, his voice worried as he noticed the dragon slayer's pained expression. "Are you okay?"

"No," Natsu mumbled. "Bad idea. Bad idea. Make it stop."

Before Happy could ask any follow-up questions, Lyon interrupted.

"Why is it all blurry?" he demanded uneasily.

Natsu cracked his eyes back open to see what the other man was talking about. The memory had gotten to the point where Zeref had appeared and destroyed Mard Geer before taking the book of E.N.D. and running off. Sure enough, all the images had a slightly blurred quality and the words had taken on a kind of slur and had begun to skip a little, like a broken record.

Natsu knew why. He didn't remember this part very well because he hadn't been paying much attention. He had been too worried about Gray, because he still hadn't been able to ascertain whether his friend was alright after being hit by Memento Mori. Couldn't they see how pseudo-Natsu's eyes kept darting towards the ice mage? Surely they could tell that the dragon slayer wasn't paying attention.

"The memory is corrupted," Rufus muttered with a frown.

"Too worried," Natsu choked out, unable to form complete sentences. Now he was the one who sounded like a broken record. "Worried. Gray."

Everyone looked over at him, concerned by his stricken, horrified tone. They seemed to notice his white face and trembling hands for the first time.

"Natsu?" Lucy asked. "Are you—?"

"No," he interrupted. "Stop. Rufus, stop."

Rufus grimaced slightly and Natsu could actually feel the other mage withdrawing from his mind, but it wasn't fast enough. Pseudo-Igneel went streaking through the sky with memory-Acnologia, and the Natsu-who-had-been was worried and wanted to go chasing after him but was making sure that Gray (the old Gray, the real Gray, the Gray that Natsu needed back again) was okay first. And memory-Gray was opening his mouth and Natsu did not—did  _not_ —want this reminder again.

"Stop," he said harshly, his voice taking on an almost panicked edge. "Make it stop  _now_."

And then it was over and the images were flickering out of existence, but not before Gray got the last word.

_"Go."_

Natsu let out a shuddering breath, trying to erase that last part from his mind. Happy had flown up and was badgering him like a worried mother hen and Lucy and some of the others were asking him if he was okay, but some of the others were asking different questions.

"What happened next that was so bad?" Gajeel muttered. "We already saw the curse and everything."

Lyon hissed out a sharp shushing sound, but Natsu fixed Gajeel with a haunted look.

"I left," he said flatly. "After Gray told me to go, I left."

He had left Gray to die and he had watched Igneel die and he had run away in a grief-stricken daze without even realizing that his father wasn't the only casualty of the battle. Unconsciously, he reached up and twisted his fingers in his scarf, the only thing he had left of Igneel now. That still hurt, the fact that his father was finally gone for good, but at least Natsu had had some time to start coming to terms with it. Whatever fragile almost-peace he had found during his yearlong getaway had been shattered when he'd come back to find Gray 'dead', piling tragedy on top of tragedy.

But Igneel was gone and Gray was still here—kind of—so Natsu would focus on his friend rather than his father right now. Natsu had left Gray to go to Igneel once, and now it was time to focus on Gray while there was still something left of him to save. The dragon slayer couldn't really regret having the chance to say goodbye to his father, but he also couldn't forget the price he had paid for it. Natsu couldn't leave Gray again. He had left once, and he still hadn't forgiven himself for it.

Gajeel had the grace to look a little penitent, and several other mages watched Natsu with sad eyes.

"Damn," Natsu grumbled, half to himself. "I should've known that was a bad idea. The fight itself was important enough to see, but I didn't think about the aftermath."

There was a pause, and then Erza and Lucy valiantly started up the discussion of what memory they should try next. Natsu was grateful that they were leaving him alone for a few minutes to recover. He found himself automatically glancing over at Gray as everyone else got distracted by the debate. The ice mage usually paid at least minimal attention to conversations going on around him, but right now all of his attention was focused solely on Natsu.

The two mages locked eyes. Gray's expression was unreadable, incomprehensible, and Natsu found himself looking away first. Although come to think of it, the few times Natsu had been able to tear his eyes away from the memory for a moment to look at the Gray who was here now, the ice mage had been watching him. Natsu wondered if he had watched the memory at all, because he had seemed much more interested in the dragon slayer. Natsu didn't know why that might be, and he doubted that he would get an explanation out of Gray.

Natsu remained subdued and out of sorts as the others moved on and started feeding Rufus more memories to mold. Happy perched in the dragon slayer's arms and stayed there, and Natsu absently hugged him for comfort. The Exceed had been with Natsu long enough to know when the dragon slayer didn't want to talk, so he remained quiet. Natsu was grateful for that. Happy's mere presence was enough, and Natsu didn't want to talk about all the emotions swirling through him.

So he stayed silent and watched as Rufus molded memory after memory. Nothing seemed to ring a bell with Gray, but Natsu thought that part of it might be due to the same problem they had run into when Lyon had tried to teach Gray his magic again: Gray simply didn't care and he wasn't very interested in the proceedings. Natsu noticed that the ice mage kept looking back over at him thoughtfully, and he didn't know why. Lyon had taken up a position next to Gray so that he could redirect his adoptive brother's attention back to the memory scenes whenever it strayed to Natsu again.

In the meantime, people kept suggesting different memories, unwilling to accept that this tactic wasn't working. There were memories of a lot of the fights Gray had had against the major villains Fairy Tail had fought, snippets of jobs he had been on with the team, and little scenes from the everyday life of the guild. There were events from the times they had fought Grimoire Heart and even Oración Seis, from the sieges of Edolas and the Tower of Heaven, from the contests on Tenrou Island and in the Grand Magic Games. They even got as far back as the face-off against Phantom Lord, because Juvia insisted on showing Gray the time when they had first met.

And throughout it all, not so much as a flicker of recognition touched Gray's face. People still kept giving Rufus memories to broadcast, but Natsu could tell that they were starting to lose hope now.

"I don't get it," Lucy said sadly, her voice soft enough that it didn't travel past the few people around her. "I really thought this would work."

"Me too," Erza agreed with a sigh. "It was a good idea. I mean, we're showing him his memories. He's just not… _connecting_ to them."

"It's the same old problem," Natsu grunted, speaking for the first time since the earlier debacle. The girls looked over at him in mild surprise. "He doesn't care enough. He's not  _trying_ to connect with the memories because they don't mean anything to him. What does it matter if they mean something to us or if they used to mean something to him? The void took it all away, and he's not interested in getting it back."

Erza nodded slowly. "It's like…his emotions have been very… _flat_ , you know? He doesn't feel much, and even when he does it's very muted. If we could teach him how to feel again, how to  _care_  again, then I think that everything else would fall into place."

"Do you want to try another sensory link?" Meredy asked, edging closer to join the conversation. "It's the only way I can think of to actually make him feel something."

Natsu nodded slowly. He didn't see another way either, but he also wasn't convinced that a sensory link would make any lasting impression on Gray. After all, it hadn't last time. The problem was that they could make Gray feel things while the link was in place, but they had no way of making sure he retained that ability to feel once it was removed. Like Gray had said, it was more like they were feeling for him while they were linked, rather than him actually feeling anything for himself.

Lucy was the one who voiced the concern. "It's worth a shot, but will it work this time? What can we do differently to try getting through to him better than we did last time?"

Meredy deflated and looked sadly at the ground. "I don't know," she whispered.

"I've actually been working on something of a theory," Levy said slowly, taking a couple steps closer to the group to make her case. Gajeel and Juvia drifted over as well. Natsu rather thought that Gajeel was surreptitiously following Levy and Juvia was not-so-surreptitiously following Gajeel.

"Did you find something?" Lucy asked hopefully.

Levy looked a little panicked when everyone turned to her with a renewed sense of hope, and she hurriedly set them straight.

"Not exactly, Lu-chan," she answered cautiously. "And it's not really a cohesive idea of how to fix Gray, so don't get your hopes up."

Some of the excitement faded away, but everyone still watched her eagerly as they waited to hear this idea.

"I've been looking through some old books and scrolls," Levy explained. "We don't know that much about the Etherious and their curses, or even how devil slaying magic works, so I did some research. I didn't really find much concrete information that was useful, and nothing on Memento Mori since Mard Geer created it himself, but some of the little snippets I've picked up have been coming together.

"First of all," she continued, warming to her theme, "is the question of why Gray's new devil slaying magic offered partial resistance against the curse at all. Some of the texts I read suggested that devil slaying magic gives some resistance to demon magic, so that might be it. But that can't explain it all, because his magic also interacted with Memento Mori in really strange ways. I think that the reason Gray's magic didn't work as intended is because Memento Mori is a curse, not magic. Gray should have had some resistance to demon  _magic_ , but curses aren't quite the same as magic, and the two aren't fully compatible. I think that magic and curses must overlap a little bit and have enough in common that the devil slaying magic could provide some protection, but not as much as it should have."

"That's all well and good," Gajeel interrupted, "but what does this have to do with fixing his memory?"

Levy frowned over at him, not pleased with being interrupted. Natsu could sympathize. Gajeel and the others had kept interrupting him too, back when he was trying to explain his theories about Gray.

"If you would just let me talk then maybe I'd tell you," she said shortly.

"Sorry, shrimp."

Levy sighed and took a deep breath before continuing. "I think that the magic/curse distinction is also why Wendy's healing magic wasn't having an effect on Gray when he first got hit by Memento Mori. Her magic wasn't equipped to deal with a curse—it was mostly only useful for healing injuries caused by other magics."

"What about Porlyusica?" Lucy asked. "She couldn't heal him either."

Natsu wondered if Lucy got a free pass to interrupt Levy since they were such good friends, because Levy didn't seem as irritated as when Gajeel had interjected.

"Porlyusica was just trying to treat Gray's symptoms," Levy explained. "She couldn't figure out how to treat the underlying problem. I doubt her potions could have stood up to such a powerful curse, and since she didn't have any experience with curses, I'm not sure she could have made anything to stop one."

Natsu nodded. It made sense. He just wished that Levy would get to the point already.

"The obvious conclusion is that magic has only partial usefulness against curses," Levy continued, "so trying to directly use magic to reverse the damage done by Memento Mori isn't going to work. When Natsu pulled Gray out of the void, he was trying to use the sensory link to force Gray to feel something in order to pull him back, and I think that's the problem. We can't make magic directly undo the damage.

"But Meredy's sensory magic  _is_ uniquely suited to this type of situation, I think, simply because it's a linking magic. We can use it as a crutch to help Gray remember things on his own. But the important thing here is that Gray has to do it for himself. We can't do it for him. Our magic can't directly affect the curse, but Gray already has a partial resistance, so he needs to fight it on his own.

"Rufus's magic doesn't seem to be doing very much on its own, but perhaps we can make it more accessible to Gray by making a link to it, through Meredy's sensory magic. Just think of her magic as a tool to help us connect Gray to us or our magic since he can't connect to them on his own. The key is that he'll have to use your channeled emotions to spark something within himself to help him make his own connections to the memories."

"So we combine them," Erza mused thoughtfully. "That might work." She turned back to where Rufus and the others were still focused on the parade of memory projections. "Hey, Rufus!"

Once Erza was satisfied that she had Rufus's attention and the attention of all their friends, she turned it over to Levy to give a quick explanation of her theory. By the time Levy had finished, people were starting to look more hopeful again.

"Who do you want me to link?" Meredy asked.

"It should be someone very close to Gray," Lucy murmured, thinking out loud.

"Lyon?" Cana asked.

Lyon looked like he wanted to jump at the chance, but something held him back. He grimaced slightly.

"Not sure that's a good idea. He's still really uneasy around me."

"And I assume that Rufus is going to use the memories of whoever is linked to Gray," Erza pointed out. "Lyon missed out on a big chunk of Gray's more recent life. It would probably be better for it to be someone from Fairy Tail, who has interacted with Gray on an almost daily basis."

Lyon looked off to the side, a pained look flitting across his face, but Natsu wasn't sure that anyone else had noticed since they had immediately moved on to discussing who would be a better option.

"If this doesn't work and we decide to go on to childhood memories then you'd be invaluable though," he told Lyon.

The older mage smiled faintly and nodded, although his eyes were still tired and sad.

"Of course," Erza agreed. "But we're starting with more recent memories first."

"Juvia wants to!" Juvia interrupted excitedly.

Natsu scowled. He knew the water mage was still helplessly fawning over Gray, but hadn't she heard anything they had said?

"No," he said, trying and failing to keep the annoyance out of his voice. "Gray still doesn't trust you either, and let's face it, Gray spent a lot more time with us than he did with you."

He immediately felt bad for snapping at her when her eyes filled with tears.

"Sorry," he muttered. "I guess I'm still on edge."

Reliving that memory of Memento Mori had rattled him more than he wanted to let on. He thought that Juvia might understand that to some extent, but she also wasn't willing to let him get away with brushing her off again. She stared him down, her small hands clenching into fists at her sides and her tear-filled eyes lighting up with grim determination.

"Juvia wants to help Gray-sama," she said firmly.

Natsu sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He understood that Juvia had been under a lot of stress and was desperate to help in any way she could since so far she hadn't been able to do much. He really could sympathize with that, and he realized that she was just trying to help Gray in her own way even if it was kind of annoying and not necessarily the best way to go about things, but she just wasn't the right person for this job.

"I know, Juvia," he said tiredly. "And you will. But for this specific task…I think you know that you aren't the one who's best suited for it. You'll be able to help more later."

She deflated a little, but still looked defiant. "Who is better suited than Juvia?" she asked belligerently.

Natsu bit back his instinctive retort of 'almost everyone', because he knew it wasn't fair to her, and he really shouldn't be taking all his stress out on her. But it was also true that anyone on Team Natsu, and perhaps a few other guild members as well, would be more qualified for this. He thought it better not to tell her that.

"I'm going to do it," he said instead, his voice flat.

Juvia blinked at him for a moment and then scowled. It was an unusually resentful look for her.

"Natsu-san is always doing everything for Gray-sama so that Juvia cannot help. It's not fair. Why is Natsu-san any better suited than Juvia?"

Natsu stared her down with cold eyes, his patience wearing thin. Maybe he had been a little harsh in how he had shot her down, but he was starting to get annoyed that she still didn't seem to see the bigger picture. She meant well and Natsu was willing to cut her some slack because she'd been having a really hard time lately, but she wasn't the only one who was hurting. He knew that she sometimes resented that he had pretty much taken charge of Gray's recovery, but he had thought that she must surely realize why by now.

"Because I've been sense-linked to him before and I was the one who used that link to bring him out of the void," Natsu said icily. "Because he trusts me more than he trusts you all. Because I've been around him more than the rest of you recently and I understand him better. Because he was my best friend before all this and I understood who he was better than you ever did. And…" He let out a breath with a soft hiss and looked away, his eyes narrowing. "Because he was protecting me from Memento Mori, which is what got him into this mess in the first place. Because he protected me and I left, and now I'm going to fix it."

"Natsu…" Happy said sadly as he wriggled a little in the dragon slayer's arms. "It's not your fault."

Natsu looked down at the Exceed and smiled a little, although it wasn't an amused expression. He released Happy to let the little cat hover in the air.

"I never said it was," he answered mildly. "But it's still my job to fix it."

Happy looked like he wanted to argue with that, and Lucy and some of the others looked worried as well. Juvia was torn between sad acceptance and the desire to keep pleading her case. But it was Lyon who put a stop to the debate.

"Let him do it," the Lamia Scale mage said flatly.

Everyone looked over at him in surprise and Juvia looked faintly betrayed, but he was staring pointedly at the ground. When he felt Natsu's gaze boring into him he finally glanced up and met the dragon slayer's eyes. They stared at each other for a moment, before Lyon nodded slightly and looked away again.

Having Lyon as an ally had made Natsu's life much easier, but the dragon slayer wasn't sure this was necessarily about that. Something in Lyon's eyes had been too  _understanding_ , as if he knew exactly what Natsu was feeling and why the dragon slayer felt such a burning need to set things right. Natsu wondered absently whether Lyon had felt something similar after Galuna Island, when he had resurrected a demon and very nearly gotten Gray killed. Lyon  _had_ seemed to try to make things up to Gray afterwards, even if he had never actually come out and said that was what he was trying to do. If Lyon had felt anywhere near as guilty as Natsu felt now, the dragon slayer wished he had been a little nicer to the other ice mage. It was a terrible feeling.

But Natsu was grateful to him, because no one was willing to argue with Lyon on this. Even Juvia nodded unhappily.

"Be careful, Natsu," Happy mumbled.

Natsu was puzzled by the warning, but brushed it off when Meredy hesitantly stepped up beside him.

"Are you ready?" she asked.

He was about to say yes, until another thought hit him and he looked over at Gray. The ice mage hadn't offered an opinion either way, but he had been following the argument closely, his dark eyes darting back and forth as everyone made their case. Now he was watching Natsu again, and although his eyes were as unreadable as ever, the dragon slayer got the feeling that Gray wasn't necessarily happy with the final decision. Something about his demeanor was giving Natsu the impression that he wasn't entirely comfortable.

"How about it, Gray?" Natsu asked. "Want to try a sensory link?"

Gray's frown deepened and he shifted uneasily.

"Does he even understand what exactly you're asking him to do?" Sting asked skeptically.

Gray's gaze flicked over to the other dragon slayer. "I understand," he said tonelessly.

There was a brief moment of surprise since Gray didn't usually offer answers or comments unless he was asked something directly. Natsu felt a little optimistic at that, and also because Gray's normal response to everything was that he  _didn't_ understand. It could be progress.

"So?" Natsu asked again. "Are you ready to do this?"

An almost unhappy look flitted across Gray's face, and Natsu got the feeling that the ice mage wanted to say no. There was a long pause before Gray finally nodded once.

"Okay."

Natsu frowned over at him, wondering if this was a good idea. This level of discomfort on Gray's part was usually reserved for the 'screamers'. The dragon slayer suspected that if anyone else had asked Gray to do this, the ice mage would have demurred. But Gray was used to following Natsu's directions, so he would do it regardless of whether or not he wanted to. Natsu wondered if he should put a stop to this scheme since Gray was so obviously uncomfortable with it, but this was the best chance they had right now.

He looked back at Meredy and nodded. "Do it."

Meredy still looked a little uneasy, but she went ahead and put the sensory link on him and Gray. The first thing Natsu noticed was that the void emptiness—that emotional blankness—was still there, muffling Gray's thoughts and feelings and leaving him devoid of most emotion. But there was also an edge of uneasiness and wariness coming through the link, and it seemed to grow stronger over the next few seconds. Natsu wondered if it was his emotions flowing through the link that were making Gray so uncomfortable. Again, he briefly considered calling it all off, but instead turned back to Rufus and the others. He wasn't willing to let this opportunity pass by.

"Should I try to feed him the emotions he would have experienced or the emotions I experienced?" Natsu wondered out loud.

"Well, if you're trying to get Gray to understand his own emotions then maybe you should try to feel what he should have felt," Lucy suggested, her face twisted in a thoughtful frown as she considered the question.

"I don't know," Erza disagreed. "It might be better to just stick with what you're feeling, because that's more genuine. There's no point in giving him artificial emotions. I don't know if that will actually help him."

There was a muted chorus of agreement.

"But it's also true that Gray should be able to better connect to the memories if he also experiences the emotions he would have felt," Levy mused. "I suppose that's kind of the problem I was talking about with Meredy's magic. We can use her magic as a link to help Gray connect to his memories and emotions through Natsu, but he's still going to have to do the work himself."

"Your best bet might be to try to pick memories where you and Gray would have felt similar things," Rufus interjected. "That way you're still helping him feel his own emotions, but you can also keep the integrity of the emotions intact."

No one could argue with that, although they all realized that it was easier said than done.

"Are you just going to use my memories this time?" Natsu asked him.

Rufus pondered that for a moment, before nodding slowly.

"It's that issue with keeping the emotions genuine again," he reasoned. "The memories are going to have to be something that both you and he can connect to, and that will be easier to do if they come from you. I think what I'll do is set up a…streaming, of sorts. I'll just broadcast whatever you're thinking about, and then you can just focus on the emotion-based aspect of it. But remember that I'm only making the pictures—I'm not going to be able to help you with the rest of it."

Natsu nodded and raised an eyebrow at Gray. "Ready?"

Gray nodded hesitantly, but Natsu could feel through the link that he didn't feel prepared at all. Oh well. If they waited on Gray forever, they would never fix the problem. But Natsu  _was_ sensitive to the possibility of overwhelming his friend if he did too much too fast, so he started off slow, with less emotionally-charged memories. He kept one eye on the memory projections and one eye on Gray, even though he could feel the ice mage's reactions through the link.

At least Gray was paying more attention this time. Natsu had to direct him to pay attention to the memories at first, but after that Gray watched them diligently. But it didn't seem to be helping much, because Natsu could feel that his uneasiness didn't fade at all and there wasn't any sense of recognition of anything. It was still difficult to tell what emotions Gray was experiencing and what emotions were just reflections of Natsu's feelings echoing across the link, but the verdict wasn't looking good.

And yet, Natsu refused to give up. His friends offered suggestions of good memories to use, and he accepted their help gratefully. He cycled through memories of fun they had on jobs, birthday celebrations, everyday guild life, friendly brawls and thrown insults, but nothing seemed to work. Those memories of good times made Natsu want to smile, but Gray's lips didn't so much as twitch upwards. The ice mage just watched the projections impassively, but although his face didn't show it, Natsu could tell that he was getting more and more agitated. The dragon slayer realized that the influx of emotions was probably starting to overwhelm Gray, and they might have to take a break soon to stop him from shutting down.

But for now they would press on and hope for the best. It was while they were watching Natsu's memory of the first time he had met Gray that the dragon slayer finally felt a flicker of recognition through the link. One second Natsu had been smiling wistfully at their antics as children, and the next he was turning on Gray hurriedly.

"What is it that you recognize?" he demanded, hope flaring within him.

Gray shrank back a little at the sudden question, and Natsu felt his discomfort increase exponentially. The dragon slayer felt a little bad for making Gray anxious, and also because this was what he suspected Gray normally felt while he was with the 'screamers'. He had never acted this way with Natsu before, and the dragon slayer got a whole new appreciation for why Lyon and the others were always so hurt when Gray was so skittish around them.

There was a flurry of excitement as the others realized that Gray had apparently recognized something. Natsu didn't have to be linked to them to know that they were suddenly hopeful as well.

"The boy," Gray said finally, shifting uneasily. "It's the other boy from the picture."

Natsu blinked at him uncomprehendingly for several long seconds until he made the connection. Then he felt all the hope drain out of him as he deflated. Glancing over at Lyon, he saw the same knowledge reflected in the other mage's eyes. Gray hadn't remembered anything at all. He had just recognized his child-self from the picture they had seen at his apartment.

"And who was that boy?" Natsu asked tiredly.

Gray considered it for a while, and Natsu could feel his uncertainty when he finally replied.

"Gray?"

That wasn't the answer Natsu had been hoping for. He felt his heart sink even further.

"And what's your name?" he pressed.

There was another long pause.

"Gray?" the ice mage suggested again, but Natsu could feel that he didn't feel any sense of connection with the name.

"So who is the boy?" Natsu asked again.

Gray's uneasiness and uncertainty intensified.

"Me?" His mouth twisted strangely as he said the word, as if he didn't quite understand it and didn't want to acknowledge it. Natsu could feel the distaste for it seeping through the link, and he knew that Gray was just telling him what he wanted to hear.

"Right," Natsu muttered morosely. Behind him, he heard Lyon sigh softly.

This clearly wasn't working. But why…? Natsu's gaze snapped back to Gray's face, and he studied his friend with a suddenly calculating look. Gray seemed to sense that something had changed, and his wary discomfort increased even further.

Back in the void, Natsu hadn't been able to break through to Gray with only happy emotions. He had needed to force the ice mage to feel the bad ones as well, the hurt and pain and grief. Gray had needed to experience both the good  _and_ the bad. They had mostly been showing Gray happy, positive memories so far, but maybe they needed to show him some of the less-happy ones too. He voiced this idea to the others, and it met with mixed reactions.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Lyon asked cautiously. "With how easily he gets overwhelmed?"

"I don't know," Natsu admitted. "But it's what worked last time."

"Did it?" Gajeel asked. "I thought it didn't really work."

Natsu sighed harshly. "I don't know," he said again. "But it's the only thing that started getting through to him."

"You already showed him everything with Mard Geer and Memento Mori, which wasn't exactly a happy memory," Gajeel pointed out skeptically. "And it didn't do any good."

"We weren't sense-linked then, you idiot," Natsu retorted, rolling his eyes.

Gajeel shrugged but fell silent, making way for everyone else to offer their opinions on the issue. There was a brief debate over how wise a decision this was, but everyone could see that their current tactic wasn't working, so they might as well try something else.

To be honest, Natsu was probably far less excited about the idea than the others were, because he was the one who would have to dredge up bad memories and relive them. And that wasn't even considering the fact that he wasn't sure either he or Gray would be too thrilled to have their worst moments displayed for the whole guild to see. But he didn't see another choice and Gray didn't vocalize the protests he was obviously feeling, so Natsu pressed on.

He remembered the times either he or Gray was upset over something and they ended up fighting with each other to distract themselves and remind each other that they cared. These were times that the other guild members hadn't recognized as bad memories, because they had just thought that Natsu and Gray were going at it like usual. Natsu was a little uncomfortable showing them these, because it meant that they were let into a secret little corner of the world he and Gray had built. But this was an integral part of his friendship with Gray, so Natsu felt that it was important to share it with his friend.

He remembered times when they had lost fights against other people as well, which was humiliating to them both. Gray's loss in the first round of the Grand Magic Games was a good example of that. There were the times when some of the dark guilds they had fought had rubbed them the wrong way and brought up old insecurities and bad memories. There were the times when he and Gray had watched their friends get hurt and couldn't do anything about it. There was the feeling of knowing they were about to die on Tenrou when Acnologia bore down on them, and the subsequent realization that they had lost seven precious years of time afterward.

He remembered that one time shortly after Galuna Island when Gray had randomly showed up in tears on his doorstep one night. The ice mage had never actually said what was wrong, although Natsu could guess, and the two of them had never spoken of the incident again, but for that one night, Natsu had held Gray until he cried himself to sleep. There was that time after the Grand Magic Games and the mess with the dragons when Gray had been crying in the carriage. Natsu still wasn't sure what had been wrong then and he'd never asked since Gray had assumed he'd been too out of sorts with his motion sickness to notice, but his friend had been unusually gloomy for days afterwards.

These and other memories flashed through Natsu's mind of their own volition, and Rufus teased them out mercilessly and displayed them for the world to see. Throughout it all, Gray grew increasingly nervous and unhappy. He had crossed his arms across his chest protectively, and through the link, Natsu could feel his nails biting deeply into his palms.

Natsu thought it was about time to admit defeat and give Gray a break, but then he caught sight of Lyon's tense face out of the corner of his eye, and it reminded him of what he had been thinking earlier. Before there hadn't been anyone reading his memories, but now Rufus latched on to that reminder, and suddenly scenes from Galuna Island were playing out in front of them.

Natsu grimaced. "Um, Rufus, I'm not sure this is a good one."

The memory make mage looked over at him and met his gaze. "Do you want me to stop?"

"Yes," Lyon said shortly.

Rufus ignored him, keeping his eyes fixed on Natsu. The message was clear: this was Natsu's decision. Natsu's first instinct was to shut this memory down before it even started, but…

He glanced over to watch the scene playing out in front of them, now at the point where Natsu had burst in just in time to stop Gray from being an idiot and using iced shell on Lyon. Natsu wasn't stupid. He had realized that this was a very emotional and depressing time for Gray. And wasn't that what he was going for here? Besides, this had also been an important bonding experience for the two of them, which wasn't all bad.

He looked over at Gray, who was watching him with an almost pleading expression. Through the link, Natsu could tell that he was stretched thin and ready to snap. He wanted to stop, but maybe Natsu could push him just a little further and make a breakthrough. But if it didn't work, this would be the last memory for now. Gray was already uncomfortable enough.

"Last one," he said finally.

"Are you fucking insane?" Lyon growled. "Look at him! He's had enough, Natsu."

Natsu knew that. He knew that, but he couldn't stop. He had tried to make his decision sound logical, as if it was based off of sound reasoning, but the truth of the matter was that he couldn't stop now because he  _needed_ Gray to remember. He needed Gray to remember  _right now_ , because it was Natsu's fault that Gray was this hollow shell and he didn't know how to live with that. He needed Gray to wake up and go back to normal.

"Last one," he repeated quietly, his voice cracking slightly with strain.

Lyon seemed to do a double take as something in the dragon slayer's voice made him look at Natsu more closely. He didn't seem to like what he saw.

"I know you're upset, Natsu, but  _wake up_."

"We should probably stop now," Erza said, her voice tight.

But Natsu couldn't stop, so he looked away from them and back at the memory. He watched as Gray prepared to use iced shell on Deliora like a stupid fool, and he forced himself to remember every single painful detail.

There was Natsu's terror at being faced with the possibility of watching Gray sacrifice himself to seal the demon, and Gray's terror at being faced with the possibility of watching another family annihilated. There was Natsu's anger at Gray for being such a fool and at Lyon for daring to pull such a cruel stunt, and Gray's anger at the demon who had taken everything from him. There was Natsu's grief at seeing Gray break down and at the possibility of losing him forever, and Gray's grief at being faced with the memories of what had happened to his parents and teacher. There was Natsu's hopelessness at the realization that maybe his voice wasn't reaching Gray after all and that the idiot would kill himself anyway, and Gray's hopelessness at the belief that nothing but iced shell could save his friends.

Natsu could feel for both of them. He'd originally intended to try to take it easy on Gray so that he didn't push him too far, but now something inside him was threatening to break and he couldn't seem to stop himself from pushing all those raw, ugly emotions through the link as hard as he could. This was his last chance right now, and so he threw everything he could at Gray so that the ice mage would remember  _something_.

"Stop," Gray rasped finally, shaking his head violently as if that could get rid of the turbulent storm of emotion Natsu had forced into him.

Natsu should stop. He knew he should stop. He could feel that Gray had gone into full-blown panic mode and was far too overwhelmed with all the emotions to continue. But he also wasn't thinking clearly. The only thing he could really see was his desperate need to make Gray feel everything, and that's what he focused on. His awareness of everything else faded away in light of his single-minded determination to push as much emotion into Gray as possible.

He was vaguely aware that everyone was telling him to stop, but he didn't pay them any mind. Rufus's projection flickered out just as Deliora's fist was coming down on pseudo-Natsu, and the dragon slayer wanted to snarl at him for daring to stop playing the memory. But the sensory link was still in place, so he didn't really need the memory at all. He could keep feeling for Gray anyway.

Not that Gray was looking too good. The ice mage had backed up several steps, closing his eyes and clamping his hands over his ears as he continued to jerk his head back and forth, as if that could block out the emotions. Natsu could feel his confusion and panic and knew that he was about to shut down, but he couldn't stop. He should really stop. He should…He should—

Something snapped sharply inside him and he reeled forward, gasping for air as he doubled over. Meredy had finally severed the link, but it took several long seconds for Natsu to get his raging emotions under control. He straightened up unsteadily and peered around blearily, coming out of his daze and really— _really_ —noticing what was going on around him for the first time. He had been vaguely aware of it the whole time, but in his feverish state of mind with his tunnel vision firmly in place, he hadn't really  _understood_. Now that he was seeing everything clearly, he was horrified.

Everyone had immediately rushed to Gray as the ice mage stumbled and collapsed into a pile on the ground, still muttering "stop, stop, stop" like a mantra under his breath. He was now curled into a trembling ball, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands still clamped over his ears. Natsu had the horrible feeling that he was seconds away from drifting in order to get away from the overwhelming sensations. Natsu had told him not to drift and Gray had agreed, but that was before the dragon slayer had broken whatever trust they had had.

"Oh shit," he breathed as he finally realized what he had done.

He had been so focused on forcing Gray to remember that he had failed to really take his friend into consideration. And now? Now Gray was a shaking wreck, moments away from seeking any kind of self-destructive refuge. And it was all Natsu's fault. Again.

A few people looked back as he spoke, taking in his stunned and horrified expression. Some of their anger faded away as they began to get a better idea of what had happened and why he had been unable to make himself stop, but Natsu didn't care about them. They could be angry if they wanted. It was Gray that he cared about.

He stared at his friend in horrified disbelief, a nauseous feeling clawing at his insides. Ever so slowly, Gray opened his eyes and tilted his head so that he could look up, finally meeting Natsu's eyes. Natsu recoiled a few paces as he saw the pained light in the ice mage's eyes. Gray was feeling something alright, but this wasn't what Natsu had wanted him to feel. Natsu had hurt him.

"No," the dragon slayer muttered, taking a few more steps back as he shook his head to clear it.

"Natsu?" Happy asked cautiously, hesitantly flying a little closer to his friend. "Are you—?"

Natsu shook his head, took one final glance at Gray, turned on his heel, and walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear, Natsu finally snapped, poor thing. It was bound to happen sooner or later.


	15. Ch 14-Natsu comes back

* * *

**Chapter 14**

_(In which Natsu does something stupid but eventually comes back for what's important.)_

* * *

Natsu knew that leaving was probably a bad idea. Every part of him ached to run straight back so that he could make sure that Gray was okay and so that he could apologize for being so stupid and insensitive. God, he wanted to turn back around. But he already knew that he had messed Gray up pretty good, and he thought that the ice mage probably wouldn't appreciate his company right now. Natsu would need to give him time to calm down and trust that the others could take care of him for now. And then…

And then he didn't know what. There was a nasty little voice playing in the back of his head, saying that he wouldn't be able to fix this. Natsu had managed to make himself into a self-made 'screamer', of sorts. Gray was already uncomfortable around Lyon and Juvia and Meredy, and they hadn't even done anything to him. Natsu had most definitely done something to Gray, and he had a terrible feeling that he had broken whatever trust Gray had once placed in him. And really, there was no one to blame but himself.

So Natsu left, unable to bear seeing everyone's pity and anger, and unwilling to hurt Gray any more than he already had. He walked quickly and lost himself in the crowd as much as possible, weaving around a bit in order to lose anyone who tried to follow him. He didn't know if anyone had come after him, but he didn't want to talk to them right now. He'd have to go back eventually and figure out what to do next, but for now he needed to be alone. Preferably for a long time, because the thought of going back terrified him.

Natsu gritted his teeth and stuffed his hands into his pockets, staring blankly at the sidewalk with narrowed eyes as he walked. He was terrified because he didn't want to see how much damage he had caused. He didn't want to see Gray curled up in a ball on the ground, seconds away from drifting to escape the overwhelming emotions Natsu had dumped on him. And he definitely didn't want to see Gray reverting, losing any progress they had made over these past few weeks. That was a distinct possibility as well. The betrayal and sudden loss of trust, along with the meltdown he was having right now, could make Gray even more unwilling to work with them. Or worse.

Natsu felt like a hypocrite. He had gotten so irritated with Juvia, had thought that he was so much better for the job, and he had screwed it up worse than she ever would have. Juvia didn't really understand everything that was going on with Gray and her methods of helping him were sometimes less than ideal, but she wouldn't have pushed the ice mage so far. Natsu knew better, but he had done it anyway.

His mind spun with all the possible changes they might have to make. His confidence in himself and in his belief that he understood Gray better than the others had been shaken. He had thought that he was the best suited to care for Gray and understand him, but was that really true? Maybe it would be better if he turned over Gray's care to someone else.

The thought alone made him grind his teeth and grimace unhappily. Natsu didn't want to do that. He still felt terrible that Gray was in this mess because the ice mage had protected him from Memento Mori, and he still hadn't forgiven himself for leaving afterwards. He needed to make that right. And yet…There was a good chance that Gray wouldn't want him around after this, and Natsu couldn't blame him. Natsu had really screwed up this time, and he had to face the possibility that it might be time to let Gray go so that one of the others could take over the role that the dragon slayer had once occupied.

Not paying attention to where he was going, Natsu bumped another pedestrian as he walked past. The other man looked up in annoyance and opened his mouth to snap at him, but a snarl spread over Natsu's face and the stranger paled and quickly hurried away. Natsu tried to smooth out his expression, but it didn't work. He was just so damn  _angry_.

He was angry at himself for pushing Gray too far when he knew better. He was angry because he had been trying to help but he had only managed to make things a hundred times worse. He was angry because he had been stupid and cruel and insensitive, but also because he knew that if he wasn't angry, he would start crying.

Natsu caught a glimpse of himself in a passing shop window and turned away hurriedly, letting out a shaky breath. He didn't really want to look at himself when he felt like such a terrible person. But there was something fascinating about it, in a macabre way. He inched back towards the window and peered at his reflection again, taking in the angry expression and anguished eyes. He wasn't sure he liked what he saw. Wasn't even sure he liked  _who_ he saw. The face looking back at him was his own, but it also had a ragged, broken quality that he knew didn't belong to him. He looked into those haunted eyes and bit back a whimper.

"What have I done?" he whispered.

The words seemed to break him, and something inside him threatened to snap. His reflection seemed to fragment as the brittle, angry expression twisted into something far more pained and sad, and his eyes welled with tears. Natsu turned away, not wanting to see himself shatter, but a flash of white in the window caught his attention. He tugged at his scarf absently, but it didn't bring him any comfort this time. In fact, it just served to make him angry again.

The dragon slayer stalked away, unwinding the scarf from his neck as he went. It had always been so important to him, such a treasured gift from Igneel, but now it just seemed to be mocking him, reminding him that he didn't deserve something so precious. Gray had been important to him too, and he had hurt the ice mage. He had taken Gray's trust and needs and feelings and thrown them away like they were nothing. He had only thought about himself and his need for Gray to remember everything right that second, and he had failed to really take his friend into consideration. He and Gray had been friends for a long time, and in one second Natsu had managed to throw away all those years of friendship and trust.

He had thrown away something invaluable, something immensely important, so why not throw away the rest of it too? Why throw away one important thing and keep another? This scarf was damn important to him, but Natsu realized that despite all the meaning it held for him, it wasn't half as important as Gray. In the end, it was only a reminder of someone he had loved and lost, and as important as it was, it could never mean quite as much as an actual person. Especially not a person like Gray, who had been Natsu's best friend, had sacrificed everything for him, and had never asked for anything in return.

Keeping the scarf seemed almost like a violation, as if Natsu was silently saying that something as trivial as a scarf was more important to him than his best friend, because he had thrown away his friend but kept a handful of dragon scales. Gray deserved better than that. And Natsu…Natsu deserved worse. What right did Natsu have to keep  _anything_ so valuable when he had been so callous?

So as he passed the mouth of another dark and dingy alley, Natsu let the scarf flutter from his grasp and drift into the shadows of the narrow passage. He kept right on walking, unable to make himself look to see where it had landed. Its absence left a hollow, aching hole inside him, and he almost turned right back around to pick it up again. Shoving his hands back into his pockets to prevent himself from reaching back for his scarf, Natsu resolutely walked on, leaving it behind him.

He was going to regret doing that—in fact, he regretted it already—but it's not like it was any more than he deserved right now. It occurred to him that if he really needed to get rid of his scarf he should have found a better way of doing it, a way that wouldn't leave it rotting away like trash as if it wasn't invaluable. Shit, he'd just thrown away Igneel's gift like it was garbage. Couldn't he have at least come up with a more respectful way to handle it? Even if Natsu didn't deserve it, that didn't mean that the scarf itself wasn't precious. But Natsu also knew that if he went back now he wouldn't be able to make himself leave it behind again, so he walked on.

There was every chance that he would cave later and come back out to search for it, but for now…for now he needed to feel that sense of loss. It didn't really distract him from the loss and anger and sadness he felt over what had happened with Gray, but it felt satisfying that he was punishing himself. He needed to make himself hurt like he had made Gray hurt. He needed to make himself hurt  _more_  than he had made Gray hurt.

And hurt he did.

Natsu didn't know how long he wandered the streets before he finally drifted to the park in the center of the city and collapsed onto one of the benches. He slumped in it gracelessly and stared blankly ahead, not really seeing or caring about what was going on around him. He sat there and berated himself for his unforgivable mistake for what felt like hours, but might have been less or more.

Someone sat down next to him. Natsu didn't react at first, hoping the unwanted interloper would get the message and back off, but then he took a halfhearted sniff at the air and his head jerked up as he stared at Lyon in surprise. Lyon was about the last person Natsu would expect to see right now, especially since the ice mage didn't seem angry anymore.

"Lyon?" Natsu asked stupidly. "What—?"

Lyon glanced over and gave the dragon slayer a tired look.

"You've been gone for hours," the ice mage commented wearily.

Natsu bit his lip and looked away, noticing that the bright light of day had begun fading slightly into the mellower tones of early dusk. He really must have lost track of time if it had gotten this late already.

"Gray? Is Gray…?" He trailed off, unable to finish voicing the question. It seemed stupid to ask if Gray was alright. Gray had clearly not been alright.

Lyon sighed. "He's stable."

"Did he—did he drift?" Natsu asked fearfully.

"No," Lyon answered quietly. "We all thought that he would, it looked like he might for a while there at the beginning, but he didn't. After he had calmed down a bit, I asked him why he didn't when he clearly wanted to. All he would say was that he made a promise not to."

Natsu looked up swiftly, fragile hope flickering in his chest. Lyon was watching him with an unwavering stare, and the dragon slayer could tell that he had guessed where that promise had come from.

"Good," Natsu muttered. "That's good."

And it was. It didn't make what Natsu had done any better or give him any sense of absolution, but at least it meant that Gray wouldn't drift, even though the dragon slayer had screwed up. Natsu knew that he couldn't expect Gray to listen to him the same way he once had, but he was glad that at the very least, Gray would stand by that promise.

"How bad was it?" the dragon slayer asked, his anxiety welling up inside him and leaking into his voice.

Lyon looked uncertain as he debated how honest he should be, but he quickly made up his mind and decided to go for the brutally honest approach.

"It was bad," he said bluntly. "He was really wound up for the first couple hours, and like I said, we thought he would just shut down and start drifting for a while there. I can't claim to have a very good understanding of what's going on in his head, but it became really obvious that he didn't know how to deal with all those emotions. I think…I think that he can't cope with them because he still doesn't understand them, and this was just too much too fast.

"He wouldn't even try to communicate with us for the first half hour or so. He just stayed curled up in a ball, shaking and muttering things under his breath. Once the initial shock started wearing off, it looked like he was trying to numb himself to all the emotion. That's when we really thought we were going to lose him again, but he pulled through. He still wouldn't talk to us or communicate with much more than nods and hand gestures for like an hour, and he didn't want anyone touching him or getting too close to him. Basically he just sat in a corner and watched us like he expected us to attack him at any moment. But he started stabilizing after that.

"He's talking again, although he's not very talkative and is mostly only giving terse one or two word responses. A lot of the emotion seemed to just…drain away, I guess. It's like he was super overwhelmed by it earlier, but now he's lost it again. He's still really wary of us though, and he was still rather jumpy and nervous when I left. But he  _is_ doing a lot better now."

Natsu winced and felt another stab of guilt as he looked away to stare at the ground moodily again.

"That's…good."

There was a pause.

"You'll have to come back eventually," Lyon said. Natsu grimaced and didn't answer immediately, so the ice mage pressed on. "Everyone's worried about you too. Happy went looking for you earlier but couldn't find you, and he's pretty much panicking at this point."

Natsu winced again. He didn't want to worry Happy, but he also didn't want to go back yet.

"You can tell them I'm alright," he said, his voice subdued.

Lyon frowned at him. "Tell them yourself," he said flatly.

"I don't want to go back yet," Natsu muttered, his fingers curling uselessly into fists.

"You can't hide out here forever," the ice mage told him softly, watching him with sad, tired eyes.

Natsu let out a breath. Maybe not, but he really, really wanted to.

"It might not be a good idea for me to be around Gray after I…" He took a deep breath to calm himself. "Maybe it would be better if someone else stayed with him tonight. And I'll probably just go back to the guild tomorrow and take it from there."

Lyon shook his head. "Those aren't decisions for you to make by yourself."

"You saw what I did," Natsu shot back, his earlier anger at himself flaring up again. "Do you really think I should be around him right now?"

"I don't know, but it isn't up to you, is it?" Lyon asked, his voice remaining mild despite the dragon slayer's frustrated anger. "What changes need to be made, what needs to stay the same…That's up to Gray."

Natsu felt his anger drain away as quickly as it had come, and he deflated, sinking back against the bench's hard back.

"I know," he said quietly. "The final decisions are up to Gray, if we can get him to make them. But for now, for tonight, it's probably better if I give him space. He can make up his mind on living arrangements later, but I'm sure he could use some time to calm down now. I don't want to…I don't want to push him too far again."

"Natsu, that decision should be up to Gray too," Lyon told him gently. "If you don't go back now, will he be glad not to see you or will he feel abandoned that you ran away and didn't come back for him? How do you know whether or not he wants to see you until you ask him?"

Natsu stared out at his surroundings dejectedly, guilt settling over him again.

"You saw what I did," he repeated miserably. "Why would he want to see me now?"

Lyon sighed quietly. "Who knows why he would want anything now? You're still the one who has a better understanding of him than the rest of us. We still need you.  _He_ still needs you."

That didn't make Natsu feel any better. If anything, it made him feel worse.

"Yeah," he said darkly, a hint of self-loathing coloring his voice. "I understand him better than you all, so I should have known better. I  _did_ know better. I knew he wasn't ready and I could feel him getting overwhelmed, and I kept pushing anyway. I knew I should have stopped. I knew it, but it was like I couldn't make myself stop. I don't know. It was like I snapped and couldn't stop myself, because I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't take watching him be like this and I needed him to remember and be  _Gray_ again. That's what I needed, and I let that overshadow what was best for him. And I…I…God, what did I do?"

Natsu broke off and dropped his head into his hands. There was a momentary pause before Lyon spoke again.

"You pushed him too far," the ice mage said finally. "But you aren't the first one to have done that. Sometimes Juvia and I push him too far because we're too unwilling to accept how uneasy is with us, and he'll start withdrawing or getting really jumpy. And there was that time when we asked for Gemini's help and he started drifting. And honestly, there are a lot of little incidents each day where someone will push him just a little too far and he'll start withdrawing. It's just that this time was a lot more…dramatic than the smaller incidents. This is the first time that  _you've_ pushed him too far, and that's why it feels so bad.

"But really, we're all human. You aren't the only one who has made mistakes over these past few weeks. You've been so stressed out caring for Gray and worrying about everything that you were bound to snap eventually. You just need to pick yourself up, figure out what went wrong, and do better next time."

Natsu swallowed hard. He wasn't sure how to respond to that. It was the truth and it was meant to make him feel better, but he wasn't sure that he actually wanted to feel better about what he had done yet. At least not until he could make things up to Gray. So instead of responding to what Lyon was really saying, Natsu deliberately picked up on a minor detail to focus on, not caring that it was an out-of-the-blue change of topic.

"I was really mean to Juvia," he muttered remorsefully.

"You were," Lyon agreed, after pausing for a moment to give Natsu a funny look. "She isn't always cooperative and sometimes ignores some of the facts, but she means well. She feels bad that Gray is so uncomfortable around her and she hates feeling like she can't help him. She wasn't terribly nice to you either, but you have to realize that you're snapping at each other because you're both under a lot of stress right now. You're rubbing each other the wrong way because you have different ideas of how to go about things, but ultimately you're working for the same goal."

"Yeah…I know." Natsu sighed. "I wasn't fair to her, especially since she would've done a better job than I did."

"You don't know that."

"She wouldn't have kept pushing him so much once she realized that he wasn't ready for it," Natsu countered.

Lyon didn't seem to have an answer for that, and they sat in silence for a few minutes. Natsu reached up to tug at his scarf absentmindedly like he often did when he was upset and needed some kind of comfort, but his hand closed on empty air and it just made him feel worse. What the hell had he been thinking, throwing it away like that? That was the last thing he had left of Igneel, and if Natsu couldn't keep it because he deserved it, he should have at least kept it for Igneel's sake. But now it was gone.

Letting his hand fall back to his lap, he noticed Lyon watching him curiously.

"What happened to your stupid scarf?" the ice mage asked. "I'm not sure I've ever seen you without it before."

"It's not stupid," Natsu said automatically. He didn't want to admit to what he had done, so he just shrugged noncommittally instead of answering.

Lyon picked up on the message that Natsu didn't want to talk about it, and dropped the subject. He let the silence drag on for a couple more minutes before speaking again.

"Let's go back, Natsu. Everyone's worried and you can't avoid them forever."

Natsu let out a shuddering breath and curled into himself, balancing his feet on the very edge of the bench as he pulled his knees up to his chest and locked his arms around them. Resting his chin on his knees, he stared out blankly.

"I don't know. I screwed up really bad this time, Lyon. Like, really bad. What if I go back and it only makes things worse?" His fingers tightened reflexively, digging into his calves. "I only wanted to help, but I hurt him instead. I hurt him and I don't…I still want to help him, I really do, but what if he doesn't want my help anymore? I just…I need him. I need him, but what if he doesn't even want to see me again? I know you think you saw how bad it was, but I could  _feel_  it. I could feel it and it was really, really bad. I can't believe I did that."

He turned back to Lyon, his eyes glassy with unshed tears.

"What if I can't fix this?" he asked, his voice cracking. "What if he can't forgive me?"

Natsu frowned a little as he noticed that Lyon was looking past him, a surprised look on his face.

"I don't think you have to worry about that," the ice mage said, nodding his head at a point on the dragon slayer's other side.

Natsu turned to look, and then hurriedly stood, almost crashing to the ground in a tangle of limbs in his rush to get to his feet. Gray was standing there, shuffling his feet uncertainly and watching the dragon slayer with apprehensive eyes. Natsu stared at him in shock, his mouth working soundlessly. What the hell was Gray doing all the way out here? And by himself, too. Natsu couldn't imagine that the others had let the ice mage out of their sight. His first thought was that Lyon had brought Gray with him, but one look at the older mage's puzzled expression made it clear that that was not the case.

"G-Gray?" Natsu choked out, his heart thumping painfully in his chest as he gaped at his friend.

Gray shifted uncomfortably, his eyes darting around the park for a few moments before settling back on the dragon slayer.

"Come back?" he said finally, his voice lilting upwards into an uncertain question.

Natsu just stared at him, still shell-shocked and unable to believe that Gray seemed to be asking him to come back after everything that had happened. His lack of immediate response seemed to make his friend even more uncomfortable. Gray lifted his hands and held them out toward Natsu. The dragon slayer's mouth dropped open, because Gray was offering him back his scarf.

"Come back?" Gray repeated, holding out the scarf uncertainly.

Natsu had no idea how Gray had found his scarf or even why he had bothered picking it up. The dragon slayer couldn't even remember exactly where he had left it, but he knew that it should be moldering in some dark little alleyway right now. Yet here it was.

Natsu sucked in a breath. During his fight with Mard Geer, shortly before Memento Mori when Gray had first arrived to join the fight, the ice mage had brought him back his scarf. Natsu had lost it when he was captured by Tartaros, and Gray had somehow found it again and picked it up to return to him. And when he had given the scarf back, Gray had said  _'If it's important to you, don't lose it again.'_

The dragon slayer let out a breathless laugh. Good old Gray, always reminding him about what mattered. The scarf was important to Natsu and it always had been, but he had thrown it away. Why? Because Gray was important to him too, and he had felt like he had thrown away that relationship and trust and stomped all over it. Natsu had lost something important, and instead of going back and trying to make things right, he had walked away and thrown away something else that was important to him.

But Gray was right again, even if he didn't realize it. When you lost something important you were supposed to try to get it back, not give up and toss other things away as if that would somehow make up for it. Natsu had tried to punish himself because of how guilty he felt, and what good had that done? Throwing away the scarf had been unfair to both Igneel and Natsu, and walking away had sure as hell been unfair to Gray. Natsu had left Gray once before and had regretted it—he couldn't do the same thing again. Gray was too damn important for Natsu to walk away from.

Natsu had pushed Gray too far because of guilt, had thrown away the scarf because of guilt, had walked away because of guilt. He didn't think that he'd be able to let go of that remorse completely, but he had been so busy looking backward that he had forgotten to look forward. So far it seemed like punishing himself had only ended up making things worse for himself and now for Gray, so maybe it was time to try letting some of that go. He wasn't sure if he could do that just yet, but maybe he would try.

"Okay," Natsu said finally, his voice wavering a little. "Okay."

The dragon slayer took a few hesitant steps towards Gray. The uncomfortable look on the ice mage's face deepened a little, but he handed Natsu his scarf like a peace offering and then quickly snatched his hands back. Natsu took the scarf and absently wound it around his neck. It felt so good having it back and it made him feel closer to Igneel again, but after the first few seconds of relief, he didn't pay it much mind. His attention was focused solely on his friend. Because although the scarf was important and Natsu was terribly relieved to have it back, it wasn't as important as the person he was coming back to.

The two friends stared at each other uncertainly for a few moments, both uncomfortable with the situation but neither willing to walk away. Natsu didn't know what was going on in Gray's head or why the ice mage had come to seek him out, but he was determined not to throw this chance away. He had screwed up, but he was going to fix things. It would take some work, but he would make things right.

"Do you want to go back to the guild?" he asked finally, a hint of anxiety creeping into his voice as he studied Gray apprehensively.

Gray watched him with wary eyes, but nodded. "Okay."

Natsu tried to force a wobbly smile and then started slowly walking back towards the guild. He made sure not to get too close to Gray since the ice mage was still eyeing him with a mixture of caution and apprehension. After a few seconds, Gray followed after him, but they didn't get more than a few steps before Natsu realized that the ice mage had stopped walking. He paused and looked back. Gray had turned around and was looking at Lyon, who was still sitting on the bench as he watched the other two mages thoughtfully.

"Coming?" Gray asked.

Surprise flickered over Lyon's face, but then the older mage smiled a little as he stood up and started walking over to them.

"Of course," he said smoothly.

Gray tried to offer Lyon a small smile in return, although it faded away after only a couple seconds. Natsu blinked at him in surprise. Gray didn't usually try modifying his expressions to suit others, and he rarely smiled unless he wasn't paying attention to what he was doing. Maybe it was a lingering effect of having all that emotion tearing through him.

The three mages walked back to the guild in silence. It was almost companionable, despite the lingering nervousness and unease. Natsu kept fingering his scarf, still not quite able to believe that he had it back again, and stealing glances at Gray. Gray was a little antsy and kept a good deal of distance between himself and the two other mages, but other than that he seemed fine.

At first Natsu was relieved at that, but then he felt a little bad that he hadn't been there for Gray when he  _wasn't_ fine. Maybe his presence would have disturbed Gray while he was still panicking, but maybe it would have helped. Natsu would never know because he had walked away instead. He silently vowed not to make that mistake again. If Gray needed Natsu to take a step back then Natsu would step back, but the dragon slayer wouldn't run away of his own accord next time.

Natsu held the door open for the others as they reached the guild hall. Gray hesitated for a second and then walked in. As Lyon stepped through the doorway after him, Natsu leaned in a little.

"Thanks," he muttered quietly.

Lyon glanced over at him and a ghost of a smile flickered across his face.

"You're welcome," he replied softly, before sliding past Natsu to enter the room beyond.

Natsu took a deep breath to prepare himself before he followed the other two inside. He could already hear everyone fussing over Gray, but as he stepped into the hall and let the door shut behind him, several sets of eyes swung in his direction. For a moment no one moved, and Natsu wondered what kind of reception he should be expecting.

Then a flash of blue hurtled across the room and Happy slammed into Natsu's chest hard enough to make the dragon slayer stumble back a half-step. The dragon slayer wrapped his arms around the furry blue bundle.

"Natsu! I was looking for you but I couldn't find you anywhere! Why were you hiding from me? But you finally came back! Are you okay? Don't run off like that again!" the Exceed babbled into Natsu's chest.

Natsu ran his hands through Happy's fur comfortingly.

"Sorry, Happy," he said to cut off his friend's unceasing torrent of half-panicked chatter. "But it's okay."

"We're glad you came back," Lucy said, giving him a hesitant smile to make him feel more welcome.

There were a few nods of agreement, although a couple people still wore disapproving looks. For the most part, everyone seemed relieved to see him back, even if they weren't necessarily happy with how he had behaved earlier.

"Funny story," Natsu said conversationally, sliding Happy's small form into the crook of his arm. "I managed to run into Gray out there, wandering around all by himself. And I thought it was odd, because  _surely_ you all wouldn't have let him go wandering off on his own, especially after…what happened."

Erza cleared her throat and shuffled her feet awkwardly. She had the grace to look a little embarrassed.

"About that…" she started. "Well, he just said that he wanted to go find something, and he didn't want to take anyone with him. We sent someone after him, but…"

Despite himself, Natsu smirked a little. "You managed to lose him?"

"Something like that," Erza said, giving him a rueful smile. He relaxed a little when he realized that she wasn't going to chew him out. "Apparently he can still be sneaky when he wants to be." She switched her attention to Gray, who was watching her impassively, although Natsu almost thought he saw a hint of smugness in the ice mage's eyes. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Gray's gaze slid sideways to rest on Natsu for a moment before he looked back at Erza.

"Yes," he said.

Natsu blinked at him in surprise for a second before lowering his head and smiling into Happy's fur.

"It's getting late," Lucy broke in.

She didn't say anything else, but her tone was awkward and unsure, and Natsu could hear what she didn't want to bring up. It was Cana who came out and said it for her.

"So, what're we gonna do about Gray's living arrangements?" she slurred, her attention never wavering from the tankard in her hand.

Natsu felt his muscles tense up and he looked away to stare fixedly at the ground. He had known that the question was coming, but that didn't mean he had to like it. He had been waiting for it ever since he had walked in the door, but that didn't make it hurt any less. Honestly, he wasn't surprised that the others were questioning his ability to care for Gray now. He had been questioning it himself, after all. He knew that he still wanted to be Gray's primary caretaker, but if Gray didn't want that right now…Natsu wasn't sure if he'd fight it. Maybe it would be better if Gray spent a few days with someone else until everything settled down, even though the idea chafed at Natsu.

"Maybe we should have someone else stay with Gray, at least for a day or two until things calm down again," Erza said carefully, watching Natsu for any sign of disagreement.

Natsu ground his teeth together but didn't protest. As much as he despised the suggestion, he knew it was probably a good one. There was a brief discussion over who would be best suited to caring for Gray. Natsu stayed out of it, absently stroking Happy's fur as he pointedly didn't look at any of them. He didn't really want to see what they thought of him right now.

"Stop."

The conversation instantly ceased and every head in the room, including Natsu's, swung towards Gray. The ice mage shifted uncomfortably, but didn't back down.

"Sorry, maybe we shouldn't be so loud," Lisanna said finally, trying to figure out what was bothering him. "We're just trying to figure out who should stay with you for now."

"No," Gray interrupted. He watched her warily.

"No?" Juvia asked uncertainly. "Wouldn't Gray-sama like someone else to stay with him tonight?"

Gray shook his head sharply. "No."

Natsu's heart was doing funny flips in his chest, but he wasn't completely sure if he was imagining things or not. It seemed pretty unbelievable.

"Do you want Natsu to stay with you still?" Lyon asked.

Gray nodded once, and Natsu wanted to shout in relief. Or cry. One or the other. Lyon threw him an 'I told you so' look. Natsu couldn't help but smile back a little. He really owed Lyon.

"Is Gray-sama sure that—?" Juvia started.

"Yes," Gray said flatly.

Lucy looked intensely relieved, and even Erza was hiding a pleased smile. In fact, most people looked relieved to some extent, although there still a few skeptical or displeased expressions.

"Well, it's been a long day," Erza commented, before Juvia could protest any further. "Maybe you should take Gray home, Natsu. I think he could use some rest."

Natsu nodded thankfully and everyone started drifting away to break off into other conversations, catching the none-too-subtle hint. Natsu wondered whether they had suddenly grown a lot of tact or if someone had warned them not to yell at him.

Shrugging it off, he looked over at Gray uncertainly.

"Give me a minute?" he asked hesitantly. Gray just shrugged, and Natsu decided to take care of things as quickly as possible.

He headed over to the table where the Sabertooth mages were talking to Meredy, Jellal, and a couple others. They paused as he approached.

"Ah, I wanted to say thanks. You know, for coming down here and trying to help," Natsu told Rufus. "And, uh, sorry about all that."

Rufus shrugged. "It was my pleasure to try to help. I only wish I could have done more."

Natsu's gaze slid over to the twin dragon slayers. "Are you guys heading back to Sabertooth soon?"

They exchanged glances and looked strangely reluctant.

"Yeah," Sting said with a sigh. "I mean, I kind of want to stay here to keep an eye on Gray's progress, but we've been away from the guild too long and the Council is still harassing us. Plus, we don't even know how long it will be before he's back to normal. We can't just leave the guild for an indefinite period of time, you know?"

Natsu nodded in understanding. He had actually been a little surprised that they had stayed for as long as they had.

"That's alright. I'll make sure to send you updates if anything important happens."

"Thanks," Sting replied. Rogue nodded his agreement.

"It's getting kind of late tonight though," Natsu added. "You can stay at my house again tonight if you want. Rufus too."

"Are you sure, Natsu-san?" Sting asked uncertainly, considering the offer.

Natsu shrugged. "Why not? My house has practically turned into a hotel anyway."

Happy snickered a little and finally wriggled out of his arms, gliding down to sit on the table.

"It'll be nice having a little more life around the house for a night," the Exceed added, prodding them into accepting the offer. "It's really quiet when Natsu's not around. Lyon can only talk so much."

Sting still looked unconvinced, but Rogue didn't seem to have any reservations this time.

"We might as well," Rogue said with a shrug. "That way we can hang around until tomorrow morning or afternoon to check up on Gray before we head back to Sabertooth."

That seemed to decide Sting, who nodded firmly. "Alright."

Happy sighed and looked over at Natsu with sad eyes. He didn't say anything, but the dragon slayer knew what he was thinking.

"Just a little longer, okay?" he said, ruffling Happy's fur. The little cat didn't look convinced, but he nodded and smiled anyway.

"Aye sir."

Natsu glanced over at Jellal and Meredy.

"Erza mentioned that you two were thinking about leaving after we tried this," he said. "How much longer are you planning to stick around?"

"We'll probably leave tomorrow," Jellal replied with a faint grimace. "The rest of the guild has gotten embroiled in a conflict with a dark guild they just discovered, and they've been badgering us to come back. We can't abandon our work forever."

"But Juvia can contact me if she needs to," Meredy added. "So if you need our help again or you have any news about Gray…"

Natsu smiled and nodded.

"We'll let you know. Well, thanks for sticking around so long." He swept his gaze over the whole table. "Goodnight, everyone."

"Goodnight," they chorused back.

Natsu left them to their conversation. There was still something else he needed to take care of, and he wanted to get Gray back to the apartment as quickly as possible. He tracked down Juvia by scent since he couldn't see her distinctive blue hair among the crowd. Apparently she had slipped out the back door and was now sitting on a nearby bench, watching darkness fall over the city.

"Juvia," Natsu said hesitantly.

The water mage startled and looked back at him. Her expression clouded with hurt and subdued anger as she saw him standing there.

"Can Juvia help Natsu-san?" she asked coolly.

Natsu winced a little at her tone and sighed. He couldn't blame her for being upset.

"No. It's just…I wanted to apologize. I know I was really rude to you before. And I didn't mean to…I don't know…imply anything. I was just really stressed out and shaken up, and I took it out on you. I know that wasn't okay, so I'm sorry."

She stared at him silently for a moment. Then she nodded slightly in acceptance, even though her eyes remained cold.

"Juvia is thankful for Natsu-san's apology."

Natsu shifted from one foot to the other awkwardly, not sure what else he could say to make it up to her.

"I know it's been really hard on all of us, and especially you, but we're gonna figure this out," he said finally. "And you'll be able to help Gray. He's already not as uncomfortable around you as he used to be. You'll get your chance, Juvia."

Her eyes softened slightly, and she looked away, turning her gaze back to the darkening city streets.

"Yes," she agreed quietly. "Goodnight, Natsu-san."

"'Night," he replied, acknowledging the dismissal.

He headed back into the guild, aware that he would still have to try making things up to her again later. Because even though she wasn't completely in the right and he wasn't completely in the wrong, he still felt as if he should take responsibility for his part in the conflict. Plus, life would be much easier if they weren't fighting each other every step of the way.

Natsu ran into Lyon by the door.

The ice mage raised an eyebrow. "I thought you were taking Gray home."

"There was something I had to take care of first," Natsu answered. He hesitated for a second instead of heading straight back for Gray. "Thanks again, for today. And I guess you were right after all."

"Of course I was," Lyon said dryly. Natsu snorted. "But if you hurt Gray like that again, you know I'll have to kill you."

Natsu laughed and smirked at the other mage.

"I'll keep that in mind." He started walking away, but paused and glanced back. "By the way, Juvia's sitting outside and she looked like she could use some company."

Understanding flickered in Lyon's eyes and he nodded to Natsu before quickly turning and heading out the door the dragon slayer had just come in from. Satisfied that he had done all he could for tonight, Natsu crossed the guild hall to fetch Gray, who was leaning against the wall and watching the goings on of the guild impassively. Erza and Lucy stood beside him, talking to each other and occasionally directing a question at the ice mage in an attempt to get him talking. They looked up as he approached.

"Thanks for keeping an eye on him," Natsu said.

"No problem," Lucy replied immediately.

Erza just eyed him. "Are you sure you're going to be okay with this, Natsu?" she asked.

He immediately bristled, but then forced himself to calm down. Erza was just worried because he had had a meltdown of his own earlier, and she wanted to make sure that he could still handle everything.

"Yeah, we'll be alright. 'Night, guys."

Erza let it go at that, and she and Lucy bid him and Gray farewell as the latter two headed out of the guild. Gray walked next to Natsu down the dark street, carefully keeping a little distance between them. Natsu looked over at him and bit his lip.

"I'm sorry," he said finally.

Gray met his gaze evenly but didn't offer any response other than a dismissive shrug. Natsu couldn't let it go at just that. He almost wished that Gray would yell or hit him or at least accuse him of something, rather than acting like things were fine. The ice mage was clearly more uncomfortable with Natsu than he had been before, so this wasn't something that could just be shrugged off.

"I shouldn't have kept pushing you when I knew you couldn't handle it," he pressed.

"It's okay."

"No, it's not okay," Natsu disagreed vehemently. "I screwed up big time, and I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you or overwhelm you or anything. I just wanted to help, but I got too caught up in trying to make you remember and I forgot about the other important things. So I'm sorry."

"Okay," Gray said after a moment, looking uncomfortable.

Natsu held back another sigh.

"I knew that you didn't want to do all that in the first place, and you only agreed because I asked you to," he said quietly. "Next time…Next time, if you don't want to do something, you can tell me. It's okay to say no, alright? You don't have to do something just because I want you to. You can tell me when you're getting too uncomfortable or overwhelmed, and we'll find another way to go about things."

There was another pause.

"Okay."

They reached the apartment building and Natsu let them into the flat. They went through the normal nighttime rituals, and Natsu sent Gray off to bed as soon as he had given him his medicine. He figured that the ice mage could use some alone time after the day he'd had. But Natsu was still far too wound up to sleep, so he paced the living room restlessly. Alone time might do Gray some good, but all it did for Natsu was give him time to think about his epic blunder some more.

Because although he'd decided that he wanted to let go of some of the guilt, he still felt terrible about what had happened. He hated knowing that he had just snapped and hurt Gray like that. He mulled over that for a while longer, before thinking about the 'conversation' he had had with Gray on the way back to the apartment. Gray hadn't said much, but earlier he had said that he wanted Natsu to stay with him, so surely the ice mage would forgive him, right?

But then another thought occurred to him and stopped him in his tracks.

Like he had said, ever since the void, Gray had been agreeing to do things he didn't want to do just because Natsu had asked him to. What if Gray had only said that he would stay with Natsu because that was what Natsu wanted? Because Gray still felt some kind of misplaced loyalty to the 'voice'? What if Gray didn't really want Natsu to stay at all?

Natsu's hands clenched into fists and he stared blankly at the far wall. He had told Gray to say no to things he didn't want, even if it was something that the dragon slayer had asked him to do. What if Gray took that to heart and told Natsu that he didn't want him around? A nauseous feeling curled in Natsu's stomach as he turned to stare at the closed bedroom door fearfully. What would he do if Gray woke up tomorrow and told Natsu that he didn't want to be around him anymore?

Natsu didn't think he could handle that. Earlier he had been all about giving Gray choices and being willing to step aside if the ice mage would rather stay with someone else for a while, but now he realized that he had just been fooling himself. He didn't want to let Gray go. He didn't know if he could.

He walked across the room shakily and sat down by Gray's door, leaning his back and head against the wood. He needed to feel close to Gray right now, and this was the closest he could get at the moment. So he sat against the door and brooded, worrying over what would happen if he lost Gray after all.

Natsu wasn't sure how long he had been sitting there before the door opened suddenly. He made a startled sound as the wooden surface against his back suddenly disappeared and he fell back into the room. He blinked up from where he lay on the floor, only to see Gray staring down at him with a neutral expression.

Natsu hurriedly pulled himself to his feet. "Gray? Are you okay? Do you need something?"

The ice mage watched him silently for a few seconds. "You aren't nearly as quiet as you think you are," he said finally.

Natsu blinked at him for a moment and then flushed with embarrassment. Gray must have heard him pacing around and might have even heard him sit against the door.

"Sorry."

Gray shrugged. "Are you planning on sleeping on the floor again?" he asked.

The dragon slayer frowned at him, not understanding. What could Gray possibly mean by that? Natsu hadn't been sleeping on the floor. In fact, he hadn't fallen asleep on the floor since…His eyes widened.

"That first night after we got you back from the void," Natsu said slowly, "I fell asleep outside your door." Gray nodded. "And I woke up on the couch. I thought that Sting or Rogue or maybe Happy had found me and moved me to the sofa. Was it…Was it you?"

Gray nodded again. Natsu stared at him with a mixture of shock and disbelief.

"But why? You didn't care about anything then, and you didn't understand even the most basic things. So why would you move me?"

Gray stared at him expressionlessly. "You said that you were going to sleep on the couch, but you were on the floor."

Natsu stared at him blankly, not quite following. "So?"

Gray honest to God rolled his eyes, which was a gesture Natsu hadn't seen him make since he had come back from the void.

"So I moved you to the couch because that's where you were supposed to be," the ice mage said dryly.

Natsu snorted and shook his head. Leave it to Gray to do something nice but have a perfectly mundane reason for doing it. Although…even if the reason he gave almost made sense, it felt like something was missing. There was the barest hint of uncertainty flickering in his eyes, making it seem like maybe he wasn't quite sure of the answer himself. Or maybe Natsu was just imagining things because he was always on the lookout for signs that Gray still retained a little of himself.

"I'm surprised you didn't wake me up," the dragon slayer commented. "You were still really unsteady on your feet then."

A lazy smirk spread over his friend's face, and it was such a  _Gray_ expression that it made Natsu want to hug him. Well, it would if Natsu and Gray were the hugging type. Which they weren't. Not at all.

"I  _did_ almost drop you," Gray remarked, amusement flickering in his eyes for a moment. Then the emotion seemed to fade away as soon as it had come. "So are you?"

"Am I what?" Natsu asked with a puzzled frown.

"Going to sleep on the floor again."

Natsu sighed and shook his head. "No, I'm not."

There was a pause.

"You should go to sleep."

Natsu blinked at Gray in surprise. Gray never told people what to do. He just listened to instructions.

The dragon slayer glanced back at the waiting couch and bit his lip. He really didn't want to go back there right now. He was still too wound up about almost losing Gray, and he was also terrified that his friend wouldn't want him around tomorrow.

"Yeah…" he muttered reluctantly.

He looked back at the ice mage, wondering if he should just work up the courage to ask Gray's honest opinion now, but he wasn't sure he had the guts to do it. He was too scared of the answer. Gray just studied him with those unreadable eyes.

"Are you really that afraid that I'll leave?" the ice mage asked finally.

Natsu jerked back in surprise and narrowed his eyes at his friend. Gray was known for not being able to understand other people's emotions and intentions these days. Was Natsu really  _that_ obvious?

"I…" Natsu trailed off uncertainly, unsure of what to say.

Gray crossed his arms and leaned back against the door frame, still watching the dragon slayer unblinkingly.

"I asked you to come back," he said flatly. "And I told you that I would stay."

Natsu frowned slightly. Yes, Gray had asked Natsu to come back today in the park, but when had he said anything about staying? Unless he was just referencing the fact that he had said he wanted Natsu to stay with him? Or no…Maybe it came from the talk they had had after Gray drifted, back when they had tried to use Gemini to read his mind. Later that night, Gray had reassured Natsu that he would stay, and that he would still be there in the morning.

Natsu looked at his friend with new eyes. Despite the fact that Gray didn't seem to care about much of anything, there had been quite a few instances where he had said something like that or remembered and acted upon things like that. If he really didn't care, then why did he still remember them and continue to take them to heart?

"Yeah," Natsu said, forcing a smile. "But you know…If you want to go…If you really would rather stay with someone else…"

Something in Gray's flat stare prevented Natsu from finishing his thought. Or maybe it was just because the dragon slayer didn't really want Gray to take him up on that offer, even if he felt compelled to offer his friend the choice.

"There's a spare mattress in the closet," Gray said finally, after letting the silence drag on for a few seconds. "If you want to sleep on the floor that badly, then drag it out and sleep on it in here."

He turned and walked back into the room, leaving Natsu to gape at his retreating back. The dragon slayer cautiously inched into the shadowy room behind him. Gray sat cross-legged on the bed and watched impassively as Natsu hesitantly opened the closet door and peered inside. Sure enough, there was a mattress leaning up against the back wall. Huh. Natsu hadn't thought that Gray was interested enough to investigate the apartment and find out where things were. The ice mage still couldn't even find the spoons or soap unless Natsu reminded him where they were.

Natsu cautiously pulled it out of the space, glad that the old Gray had kept everything neat and had gone for a more minimalistic style. If this had been Natsu's closet, it would have been impossible to get anything out without setting off a landslide. The dragon slayer maneuvered the mattress into the main room and then frowned at it uncertainly. He had gotten it simply because Gray had mentioned it, but now that he had it, he wasn't quite sure what he wanted to do with it.

He glanced back at Gray, who was still watching him expressionlessly. After a moment, the ice mage lifted one pale hand and silently gestured to the floor by the bed. Natsu hesitated a moment more before dragging the mattress over and letting it fall to the ground with a dull thud. Gray immediately untangled his legs and laid down, pulling the covers back over himself and rolling over so that he was facing away from Natsu. Following his lead, Natsu slowly lay down on the mattress as well, but found him staring up at Gray's shadowed form with sleepless eyes.

"Can I ask you something?" the dragon slayer asked into the stillness.

There was a brief pause.

"If you must," Gray answered, his voice slightly muffled since he didn't turn around.

"When you first came back from the void…Well, if you found me outside your door, then you must have left your room. Why did you? I mean, you made it pretty clear that you didn't need anything or even know what you might need. Unless you just found me in the morning? But then I would have expected one of the others to find me first."

The bed's mattress groaned slightly as Gray flipped over so that he could look at Natsu again. The faint light coming in from the window reflected off his dark eyes, giving them an even more unsettling appearance than usual.

"No. I woke up again during the night and was confused. And I was still half-convinced that everything that happened was…I don't know. Unreal. So I went to double-check that it was still real and that everything actually was still here. That's when I found you."

Gray's gaze sharpened and his eyes took on a strangely knowing look. "But I suppose you would understand that. Isn't that why you were sleeping on the floor in the first place?"

Natsu stared at him speechlessly. That had, in fact, been his main motivation for sitting outside Gray's door and listening to his breathing—because Natsu had needed to know that Gray really was inside that room and it hadn't all been some elaborate dream. But Gray shouldn't know that. Natsu stared into the ice mage's eyes for a few moments longer, marveling at how they could sometimes be so blank and empty and unknowing, but sometimes seemed like they stared into your very soul and understood everything they saw.

Then Gray looked away and the spell was broken as the ice mage rolled back over.

"Goodnight," he said, his voice a little muffled again.

"'Night," Natsu replied absently.

He stared at Gray's back thoughtfully. He still felt terrible about what had happened today, but he was starting to get the idea that this setback hadn't ruined all of their progress with Gray after all. Gray had been far more talkative than usual tonight, and he had even brought up Natsu's emotions as if he had understood them and had made some startling insights of his own. He had even come after Natsu earlier instead of passively waiting to be instructed to do something. Natsu didn't know what that meant. He wasn't sure if it was a sign that Gray was recovering or not, but he wanted to think so.

That thought finally soothed him enough that he let go of his fears and guilt and drifted off to sleep to the sound of Gray's even breathing, just like he had done that very first night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying to justify Natsu tossing the scarf without being OOC was really hard and I'm not sure if I quite managed it, but I just couldn't bear to scrap the idea once I thought about Gray bringing it back to him. Plus it kind of fits in with some other things and themes.


	16. Ch 15-Gray gains an obsession

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my headcanon, Gray is a really neat person. I'm not sure exactly why. I think it has something to do with the precision of his molding and his sometimes more methodical approach to things. Then I had to talk about his writing for something else and came up with the idea that his handwriting would be really neat for some of those reasons, and then the idea of him being just a generally neat person kind of arose from that. I kind of exaggerated that tendency a little here to give better contrast.

* * *

**Chapter 15**

_(In which Gray gains an obsession and his lack of memory is called into question.)_

* * *

Natsu woke slowly the next morning, peering about groggily as his sleep-addled brain tried to process where he was, since he was clearly not on the couch like he was supposed to be. Then he recalled the events of the previous night and sat up hurriedly, his eyes immediately seeking out Gray. The ice mage wasn't there. The bed was neatly made and completely empty.

Natsu jumped to his feet in panic, staggering a little until he found his balance. His first thought was that Gray had left. Gray had left because Natsu had been such a selfish, insensitive jerk. And he had every right to do that, but Natsu didn't know how to deal with that. But then again, Gray had made it pretty clear that he had no intention of leaving. He had probably just gotten up early. Yeah.

It was kind of weird since the ice mage rarely got up before Natsu and preferred to stay in bed for as long as possible. Natsu had once asked him why he seemed to like sleeping so much, and Gray had said that it was the closest thing he had to feeling like he was back in the void, which had been terribly disheartening but had at least explained his sudden penchant for sleeping in. But Gray  _had_ gotten up earlier than usual on occasion, like that time when he had gotten up before Natsu and rewritten all the labels on the medicine bottles. That was definitely what had happened. There was nothing to worry about.

All the same, Natsu hurried to search the apartment, needing to make sure that Gray really was still here. He headed out of the bedroom, but paused as he took in the state of the living room. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with it, but there was something just a little off. He frowned as he studied the room carefully. If anything, it was just a little too…neat. Natsu wasn't a neat person by any means, and he hadn't taken too many pains to keep Gray's place as spotless as the ice mage had normally kept it. He knew that he had left dirty dishes out here and had made a mess of the desk back when he had been searching for paper and pencils, but everything had been cleaned up again. There wasn't a dirty dish in sight, and the desk had been straightened out.

Natsu padded across the room and peered at the desk curiously, snorting in disbelief as he realized that everything on its surface had been meticulously adjusted so as to be perfectly straight and streamlined. All the pencils and pens had been organized, each facing the same direction. Papers had been carefully straightened so that they were perfectly aligned with the rest of the pile. Natsu opened one of the drawers he remembered rifling through, and found that it had been straightened out as well. This almost obsessive-compulsive need for cleanliness was something he would have expected from the old Gray, who had been remarkably neat, stripping habit aside.

He headed for the kitchen, noticing other little touches that had been cleaned up as well, from the picture of Gray, Lyon, and Ur having its frame arranged at a precise angle to the fact that the floor had been swept and the shelves dusted. The book Natsu had removed from the bookshelf had been replaced, and although the dragon slayer remembered making a mess of the shelf when he had been searching for a good copying book, every book's spine was exactly level with the ones beside it. Natsu thought it was patently ridiculous.

He paused in the kitchen doorway for a moment, his gaze immediately fixing on Gray. The ice mage was sitting at the kitchen table, wholly absorbed in whatever he was scribbling in the notebook he had spread out in front of him. Natsu edged closer, curious as to what Gray was writing since he didn't actually seem to be copying anything for once, but his friend chose that moment to glance up and give him an unreadable look.

"Good morning," Gray said, before returning his attention to his writing.

Natsu took the hint and backed off, not willing to press Gray too much after all the drama of the previous day. Still, it was reassuring that Gray was still here and still willing to talk. Natsu would have to be careful though, until he could gauge exactly how uncomfortable Gray was with him now. Gray had seemed pretty wary and apprehensive back when he'd first hunted Natsu down to ask him to come back, but later that night he hadn't been nearly as wound up. Natsu wasn't sure what he should be expecting today.

"Good morning," Natsu replied, testing the waters. "You're up early."

"Hm," Gray hummed noncommittally, apparently more interested in the notebook than in Natsu.

"How are you feeling?" the dragon slayer pressed.

Gray shrugged. "Fine," he mumbled, not looking up.

Natsu hesitated a moment, searching Gray's behavior for any sign of what he might be thinking. Was he being short and uncommunicative because he was mad or hurt? Because he was still uncomfortable with Natsu? Or maybe it was just because he was so focused on his writing again that he just wasn't paying much attention to Natsu? Nothing about Gray's posture screamed uncertainty or uneasiness like it had yesterday. In fact, the ice mage seemed perfectly calm and wasn't radiating any signs of mistrust.

Natsu decided to take that as a cautiously optimistic sign. He'd still be careful because Gray was impossible to read these days and it was entirely possible that Natsu was misunderstanding the situation entirely, but for now things seemed to be going alright.

Shrugging off his concerns for the moment, the dragon slayer decided to make breakfast. He turned away from Gray to start preparing their food, but paused once again as he realized that Gray's manic cleaning spree had spread here as well. A good number of dirty dishes had piled up on the counter and in the sink over the past few weeks since Natsu hated doing dishes and rarely washed anything unless it was too dirty to justify using it again without cleaning it first. They were all gone now, the counter and sink clean and sparkling. All the old food stains Natsu had been ignoring were cleaned off, and all the crumbs he had left scattered over the table and floor were missing as well.

Natsu shook his head in incredulous amusement. "You've been cleaning, huh?"

Gray glanced up and raised an eyebrow, giving the dragon slayer a scathing look. Natsu almost expected to hear one of his friend's snarky comebacks, but the old Gray's usual sarcasm didn't surface in his voice.

"Yes," Gray said instead, before refocusing on the notebook.

Natsu watched him curiously for a moment, but then shrugged and began the hunt for the dishes he needed. He began opening cabinets, rolling his eyes as he realized that all of these had been meticulously organized as well. These cupboards had become a hodgepodge of sorts over the past weeks, because the few times Natsu  _had_ actually washed dishes, he had just shoved everything into whatever cabinet he felt like jamming stuff into. The cabinets had begun looking more like his eclectic ones at his house and had started to have a kind of homey feel to them. Now they were normal, boring cabinets again.

Natsu briefly wondered how long it had taken Gray to organize this mess since it had been of catastrophic proportions, but he was quickly distracted. As he kept looking back and forth between different cabinets and drawers, a puzzling suspicion began tugging at the edges of his awareness.

He couldn't be one hundred percent certain since he didn't usually pay attention to unimportant details, but he could have sworn that the cabinets were now arranged in exactly the same way they had been organized when Natsu and Gray had first moved back in. In other words, they were organized the same way Gray had kept them before the mess with Memento Mori. But that was impossible, because there was no way Gray should remember something like that now. The ice mage hadn't paid any attention at all to the cabinets ever since he had moved back in here. Natsu did all the cooking and searching for (mostly) clean dishes to eat on and use. Gray had never shown an interest in any of it, and Natsu knew for a fact that the ice mage hadn't really been watching him as he moved around the kitchen for the first few days, which was the only time when the cabinets had still been organized like this.

Natsu temporarily aborted his search and turned to look at Gray with a puzzled frown, trying to figure out what was going on here.

"Second lower cabinet to the right of the sink," Gray said absently, not looking up.

Natsu's frown deepened as his bewilderment grew. "What about it?" he asked.

"That's where I put the pan you normally use for bacon," the ice mage replied.

"How do you know that's what I'm looking for?" Natsu asked in astonishment, startled by the thought that his friend could suddenly read his mind.

Gray finally looked up again and scowled at the dragon slayer, and this time Natsu actually did get a sarcastic response.

"Since when do you make anything besides bacon for breakfast?"

Natsu blinked at him for a moment and then snorted in amusement.

"I can make something else if you prefer," he said, torn between excitement that Gray was so unusually lively today and confusion about the out-of-character behavior.

Gray shrugged dismissively. "You can make whatever you want."

"I know I can," Natsu agreed. "And I'm going to make bacon. But if you want something else, I can make that for you."

Gray seemed to consider it. "I'm not very hungry. You can just make me a slice of toast. There's jam in the fridge. And I might eat some of your eggs."

Natsu rolled his eyes as he fetched some bread. "What kind of breakfast is  _toast_?" he asked distastefully, even as tried to hide his surprise that Gray was actually offering an opinion on food.

"The breakfast of someone who's tired of eating bacon every day," Gray sniped back.

Natsu snorted as he tried to heat up the bread with his magic. Clearly he was out of practice, because he only managed to burn it to a charred crisp. Grumbling to himself, he tried a couple other pieces until he made one perfectly golden brown.

"How can you be tired of bacon?" he asked Gray as he struggled with the bread. "Bacon is the king of the food pyramid," he added, modifying one of Happy's favorite quotes.

"I thought that was fish," Gray disagreed distractedly as he peered at something he had written and then slashed a line through it.

"Ha," Natsu said. "Only Happy thinks—"

He broke off and gaped over at Gray. In fact, 'fish' is what took the place of 'bacon' in Happy's original form of the quote, but Gray shouldn't know that. Then Natsu shook his head and tried to brush it off. He was imagining all sorts of connections that weren't there now, in his desperation for Gray to remember something. Happy had probably mentioned the phrase to post-void Gray at some point. It wasn't like Natsu had been right beside Gray and Happy every second of the day. The Exceed could have mentioned it while Natsu wasn't there.

"Right," the dragon slayer muttered, trying to clear his head. Opening the fridge to look for the jam Gray had mentioned, Natsu resisted the urge to sigh as he realized that this had been reorganized as well. He scowled as he searched for what he was looking for.

"On the door," Gray offered, still focused on his writing. "The middle shelf on the door."

Natsu snagged the jam and shut the refrigerator door with his foot as he opened the drawer he remembered had contained all of the silverware before he had begun disorganizing things. Sure enough, all the silverware was back where it had originally been. Grabbing a butter knife, he slathered the toast with jelly in as messy a fashion as possible. He went to put it on a plate to give to Gray, but realized that he hadn't fetched one yet.

"Oh crap. Gray, where are the—?"

"Top left cabinet, second shelf," Gray interrupted.

The ice mage had temporarily abandoned the notebook so that he could watch Natsu with a distinctly amused expression. Natsu blinked at him uncertainly for a moment, but opened the indicated cabinet. There were the plates, just like Gray had said. Shaking his head in something like awe, Natsu took one out and deposited the toast on it. He slid the plate across the table, and Gray deftly snagged it before it went whizzing past him.

"Thanks."

"No problem," Natsu answered, leaning down to retrieve the bacon pan from the cabinet Gray had pointed out earlier. He found the bacon and eggs easily in the fridge and started cooking them, but he was distracted by his own wandering thoughts.

Gray seemed… _different_  today. He was more talkative for one, and some of his old sarcasm and dryness seemed to be coming through again. Natsu felt a wave of nostalgia. This morning's conversation was reminiscent of Natsu and Gray's usual banter. Natsu hadn't had a teasing conversation like this with Gray in…a long time. Since Tartaros.

The dragon slayer was dying to ask Gray what was going through his mind, if he had begun remembering things or falling into old habits, but he was afraid that directing the ice mage's attention towards the unusual behavior would make it disappear again. That's what had always happened before. Of course, all the previous times had been smaller incidents, such as an amused half-smile or offhand comment. There had never been anything as long and drawn out as this conversation.

Not to mention the fact that Gray had gotten up early and decided to clean everything. The fact that everything seemed to be back in its pre-void positions…There was no way Gray should remember that. Was it some kind of subconscious impulse that had driven the ice mage to clean up Natsu's mess and replace things in their original places? But if so, why hadn't Gray done something like this before? The place had been a mess for weeks and Gray hadn't seemed at all interested in fixing it until right now. Natsu didn't want to just assume that things were suddenly getting better, but he felt a jolt of hope anyway.

He grabbed another plate and dumped the bacon and eggs on it. Turning off the stove, he headed to the table and sat down next to Gray, scraping some of the eggs onto the ice mage's plate with a fork. Gray hummed a wordless thanks as he took another bite out of his toast. For now, Natsu didn't mind his lapse back into silence. The dragon slayer was content to watch Gray eat and write, still trying to puzzle out what exactly had changed about him since the previous day. For his part, Gray just ate absently as he flipped back through the notebook, his eyes moving back and forth across the pages as he reread whatever it was that he had written. Natsu would kill to find out what that might be.

As he finished eating, Gray snapped the notebook shut. Leaving it on the table, he carried his dishes over to the sink and left them there as he moved to the little piece of counter that had been taken over by Porlyusica's medicines. Natsu raised an eyebrow as Gray quickly and efficiently selected the appropriate bottles, measured out their contents, and downed the medicine with a slight expression of distaste. The cluster of bottles had been organized into neat rows as well, and Natsu had the sneaking suspicion that Gray had arranged them by use and instructions, with all of the morning meds on one end, all the evening ones at the other, and the specialized just-in-case ones in a little group set slightly apart. Had Gray really been  _this_  obsessive about cleanliness and organization before?

"Are these really necessary?" the ice mage asked, casting a displeased eye over the selection of bottles as he headed back for the sink again.

"I don't know," Natsu said with a shrug. "They don't seem to be doing much if you ask me, but I guess they make Porlyusica feel useful. Besides, she's way too scary to cross, so we'll just follow her instructions for now. She'd kill us if she found out that we disobeyed her."

Gray glanced back at the dragon slayer with an almost smug look. "You mean that she'd kill  _you_. She's not as mean to me."

Natsu nodded in thoughtful agreement. Porlyusica had been a lot more gentle and subdued with Gray over the past couple checkups.

"I think she still feels bad that she couldn't save you before," Natsu mused. "And she doesn't want to screw things up and lose you again."

"Hm." Gray's expression closed off and he turned back around to start washing off his plate.

Natsu bit his lip, realizing that he probably shouldn't have said anything. Gray sometimes got uncomfortable and withdrawn when someone mentioned things from before the void, quite possibly because he still didn't really equate himself with who he had been.

The ice mage had produced a dish towel from somewhere and stretched it out on the counter, and he deposited his now-clean plate and fork on it. Then he started scrubbing away at the bacon pan.

Grabbing at the opportunity, Natsu hurriedly reached over to flip open the cover of the notebook. He paused as Gray coughed pointedly. Looking up, he realized that the ice mage had twisted back around and was watching him with slightly narrowed eyes. It was like he had a sixth sense or something. Natsu reluctantly dropped the cover and began stabbing at his eggs again.

"Sorry," he muttered, embarrassed to have been caught snooping. "Can't blame a guy for trying."

Gray turned back around to continue his struggle with the greasy pan.

"Since when have you ever been interested in reading anything?" the ice mage asked dryly.

Natsu blinked at him. That statement almost sounded like something the old Gray would have said, because the old Gray would have known that Natsu wasn't interested in reading. The new Gray wouldn't have had that many opportunities to realize that. Natsu wanted to ask, but was too afraid that Gray would shut down again.

"Since half an hour ago," he said instead.

Gray snorted and shook his head. Natsu watched him thoughtfully as he finished washing all the dishes and moved on to dry them and return them to their designated cabinets and drawers. Gray hadn't washed any dishes since he had come back from the void. He had never taken his medicine on his own either. It was weird. Good, but weird.

Natsu finished eating and dropped his plate and fork into the sink. Gray put away the last of the clean dishes and gave Natsu a pointed look as the dragon slayer made to leave the dishes there and go finish getting ready to head to the guild. Natsu took the hint.

"I'm washing, I'm washing," he grumbled, turning on the water and halfheartedly swiping the dishrag across his plate.

Gray nodded in satisfaction and moved away from the counter. Natsu heard a soft scraping sound behind him and glanced back, only to see that the ice mage had gone back around to the table and pushed in the chair Natsu had been sitting in. The dragon slayer rolled his eyes. Now he couldn't even leave a chair out without Gray getting all OCD about it. Natsu hurriedly dried the dishes and shoved them into their proper places, not daring to put them in the wrong spots while Gray was so fixated on cleanliness and organization.

He turned back to Gray again. "I'm gonna go get ready, and then we'll head to the guild, alright?"

"Okay," Gray agreed.

Natsu left Gray prowling around the kitchen and quickly went to finish getting ready. When he returned, he noticed that Gray was now rifling through things in the living room. Natsu silently watched for a couple minutes as the ice mage flipped through papers and looked at pictures. He picked up objects and turned them over in his hands, and ran his fingers along the spines of the books on the shelves. He studied all of these things with curious, hungry eyes. It puzzled Natsu a little, since Gray hadn't shown any interest in exploring his personal effects up to this point.

At that moment Gray noticed Natsu standing in the doorway, and snatched his hand back from where it had been tracing over the glass of a picture frame. The ice mage looked a little rattled, but then shook his head slightly and seemed to relax again.

"Ready to go?" Natsu asked, still watching Gray curiously. The ice mage nodded and wordlessly followed the dragon slayer out of the apartment. Natsu glanced back through the door to the kitchen as he walked past, but the notebook was no longer lying on the table.

Gray's talkative mood seemed to have evaporated, and he appeared too distracted by his own thoughts to pay much attention to Natsu's attempts at conversation on the way to the guild. Natsu eventually stopped talking, realizing that he wasn't likely to get much more out of Gray right now. He'd just have to be thankful for Gray's overly talkative mood this morning at the apartment.

When they got to the guild, everyone wanted to know how Gray was doing today and how he had handled being around Natsu and whether things had gotten any worse or progress had been lost. Natsu answered all their questions as patiently as he could, but came to the conclusion that they wouldn't be satisfied until they had heard from Gray hismelf. He finally turned to Gray in exasperation.

"Gray, why don't you tell them…" He trailed off and blinked at his friend in shock. "What happened to your shirt?"

"My…shirt?"

Everyone looked over at the ice mage, and there were several audible gasps of surprise. Gray frowned and looked down at himself in puzzled bewilderment. Then his eyes widened slightly.

"Where did my shirt go?" he asked in confusion.

There was a brief pause.

"Did he just strip?" Lucy asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

Lyon started laughing. "Go figure. I guess some of his old habits are starting to come back after all."

Suddenly everyone was all smiles, this development bringing them new hope. Gray's confusion deepened as he looked around at all the suddenly happy faces and took in the pleased chatter. He clearly didn't understand why a missing shirt was cause for celebration.

"Juvia found Gray-sama's shirt!"

The water mage bent over to snatch the discarded shirt off the floor several feet away, and hurried to Gray's side. She held it out to him and smiled at him hopefully. Although he still looked a little lost, he tentatively took it from her. He eyed it warily, as if it might come to life and jump out of his hands at any moment, but carefully slipped it back on.

"Thanks?" His uncertainty about what had just happened made his words sound like a question, but Juvia beamed anyway.

Natsu smiled a little as well, pleased that Gray had accepted her help without trying to distance himself from her like he normally did. Come to think of it, he had seemed a little less blatantly uncomfortable with Lyon last night, when he had found Natsu and the older ice mage in the park. Maybe he was making some genuine progress on that front.

"Natsu, is this the first time he's done this?" Erza demanded. "Has he done anything else like this?"

Natsu grinned and briefly outlined the morning's events. He momentarily considered mentioning some of the things Gray had said and done the night before, but ultimately decided against it. That experience had been intensely personal and emotional for him, and he didn't really want to share it with the others right now. But he did tell them about Gray's cleaning spree and how he seemed to have restored the apartment to its original condition. He told them about how talkative Gray had been this morning and how the ice mage had even regained a little of his dry humor temporarily, and briefly mentioned the notebook as well.

Everyone listened intently to his story, and got more and more excited as he gave them more details. Gray, on the other hand, seemed to become more and more withdrawn and uneasy, which worried Natsu a little. When the dragon slayer had finished, a lively conversation sprung up about what great news this was, and they debated how much Gray could be expected to improve now that he was maybe starting to almost-remember things. Gray himself didn't participate, instead choosing to sit on a bench and stare at the table's wooden surface morosely. Natsu kept an eye on him, not liking this sudden shift in demeanor.

"It can't be a coincidence that all this is happening right after we tried using Rufus and Meredy to help him remember," Lyon said. He glanced over at Natsu with a satisfied gleam in his eyes. "Looks like your mistake might have had some positive effects after all."

Natsu shrugged. He wanted to believe that, but it still didn't change the fact that he had screwed up. If he had actually ended up helping Gray then he couldn't really regret it, but he still felt bad about what happened.

"Sometimes you have to push people out of their comfort zone to make real progress," Erza agreed, giving Natsu a small smile.

The dragon slayer frowned a little. "Maybe so, but I'm not going to do that again."

"Of course not," Erza said hurriedly, giving him an apologetic look. "I didn't mean it like that."

"I know," Natsu reassured her. "It's okay."

"Hey guys," Bickslow said slowly, apparently distracted from the current line of conversation. Everyone turned to him. He had lifted his visor and was staring at Gray intently. "You know how I said that his soul was tattered at the edges and kind of faded when he first came back from the void?"

"Yes," Erza replied, concern flitting across her face. "Is something wrong?"

He shook his head. "No, it's just that…Well, his soul was almost insubstantial when he came back, as if he was barely existing at all, but it seems…stronger, now. I thought that I might have noticed it getting a little brighter over the past couple weeks, but the difference was so slight that I couldn't be sure whether it was really there at all. But now…It's looking a lot better."

Natsu looked between Bickslow and Gray, his eyes shining with hope and excitement.

"That's great!" he said cheerfully.

"Yes," Bickslow said cautiously, "but don't think that this is the end. It's a lot better than it was, but it's still nothing like it should be. It still looks terrible, so there's still a lot of work we're going to have to put in to fix it. Of course, I don't know how much it  _can_ be fixed, but the fact that it has improved at all is promising."

Natsu just grinned, not willing to have his spirits dampened today.

"I can't believe we have to leave right when he's finally starting to really improve," Sting said with a disappointed sigh.

"I'm sure the guild would understand if you wanted to stay a little longer," Rufus offered diplomatically, but Sting just shook his head regretfully.

"There's too much going on there right now, and I  _am_ technically the leader. Besides, we don't know how long the recovery process will take from here on out. We could still be here for months."

"It's alright," Natsu put in. "We know that you're busy. It's nice that you've stuck around this long."

Sting nodded absently and tried to smile. "True enough. Thank you for letting us stay at your house, Natsu-san."

"And if anything changes with Gray, let us know?" Rogue added, studying the ice mage with crimson eyes.

"Of course," Natsu replied. "We'll keep you updated."

After the Sabertooth mages had said their final goodbyes and exited the guild, it was Jellal and Meredy's turn to take their leave.

"We'd stay longer, but…" Jellal trailed off and shrugged apologetically.

"We know," Erza said, forcing a smile. "Good luck with the dark guild."

"Thanks."

"I don't know if you think that my magic might have helped Gray a little yesterday," Meredy added uncertainly, "but if you want to try using it again later, Juvia can contact me."

"Juvia thinks that Meredy-san's magic was very helpful for Gray-sama," Juvia replied, smiling at her friend. "Juvia is very grateful for Meredy-san's help."

Meredy smiled back. "No problem. It was nice to feel useful. I'll see you later, Juvia."

As the members of Crime Sorcière left, everyone began drifting into their own conversations again. Erza remained where she was standing, staring after the departing members long after the doors had closed behind them.

"Going to miss Jellal?" Lucy asked sympathetically.

The requip mage sighed.

"He was around so much longer than usual this time, and I didn't talk to him half as much as I wanted to because I was so distracted with Gray. Who knows when I'll see him next? I should have made the most of my time, but now it's too late and he's leaving again."

"I'm sorry, Erza," Lucy murmured. "But there's always next time."

Erza's words reminded Natsu of something he had heard not too long ago, and he decided to share those words of wisdom.

"People always leave," he told her grandly. "You can tell which ones really care about you by who comes back."

She blinked at him in astonishment for a few seconds. "Since when did you become all wise and philosophical?"

Natsu grinned smugly as he preened. "Maybe you just underestimate me," he replied smartly.

"He hasn't," Gray disagreed, speaking up again finally. All eyes swung to him. "He heard it from the landlady."

Erza and Lucy looked faintly confused, but Lyon started laughing.

"Busted," he told Natsu.

The dragon slayer rolled his eyes. "Thanks a lot, Gray," he grumbled. "Was that really necessary?"

Erza and Lucy's mouths tugged upwards into small smiles as they pieced together what was going on. A wicked half-smile spread across Gray's face.

"You're welcome," the ice mage replied graciously. His smirk widened a little. "And of course it was. We wouldn't want you fooling them into thinking you're clever, would we?"

Natsu stared at him for a second and then laughed. He laughed and really was happy, but it made his heart ache a little too, because he missed having this type of banter with Gray. He really, really did.

"Wow, you weren't kidding," Lucy remarked, looking Gray up and down with hopeful eyes. "He really is a lot chattier than usual today. And gosh, he sounded so much like himself right then."

Gray's amused expression faded and the ice mage bit his lip, his gaze wandering to the side and fixing on a point beyond them. An air of uneasiness settled over him once more, and he looked almost…sad.

"What did I say?" Lucy asked, alarmed.

Natsu leaned in a little, keeping his voice low.

"He kind of starts shutting down whenever we say anything about who he was before," he said quietly. "I should have mentioned that to you earlier. Just try to avoid some of those kind of comments, I guess."

"Oh," she said in a small voice. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. Don't worry about it," Natsu reassured her. He glanced back over at Gray. "Besides, you aren't mad, are you?" he asked the ice mage.

Gray looked back over at them and his eyes darted between Erza, Lucy, and Lyon before coming to rest on Natsu again. He frowned slightly, as if confused.

"Why would I be?" he asked flatly.

"See?" Natsu asked cheerfully. "No harm done." Then he switched his gaze back to Erza. "I'm kind of surprised that you haven't stolen Gray to take him walking yet."

Erza winced slightly and suddenly looked a touch uncomfortable. "Um, about that…"

Natsu frowned at her. "Are you discontinuing that routine? Huh. You seemed pretty into it."

"No, no," she said hurriedly. "The walks stay. But you should know that Porlyusica is planning to stop by today. I don't want to be walking with Gray when she gets here."

Natsu stared at her, aghast. "Porlyusica is coming? Why? I didn't know she was planning on coming today."

Erza bit her lip.

"Well, we actually asked her to come up and check on Gray today, to make sure that no harm was done by everything that happened yesterday." She gave him an apologetic look. "He really wasn't looking good last night. We weren't sure if she'd be able to do much for him, but we thought that we should at least have her come by and take a look. Of course, we didn't realize that he'd actually improve some."

"Oh no," Natsu groaned, resisting the urge to bang his head into a wall. "She already hates me, and now she's going to lecture me some more and yell at me for being so stupid. She's scary enough when I  _haven't_ actually done anything wrong."

Everyone looked vaguely sympathetic, except for Gray, who appeared to be faintly amused.

"Sorry," Erza apologized. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. And to be honest, it's probably still a good idea. It doesn't hurt to double-check that he's doing alright."

Natsu sighed unhappily. He could see the sense in what they had done and he would be able to rest easier if Porlyusica gave Gray a clean bill of health and confirmed that Natsu's screw-up hadn't adversely impacted his friend, but it was still going to be a miserable meeting. He glumly thought back to the time when she had berated him for a good forty minutes just because he hadn't been able to repeat back all the information she had given him about the myriad of Gray's medicines. It hadn't been fun, and he could tell that this time would be even worse. Not that he could really blame her for being unhappy with him for screwing up so badly, but he felt terrible enough about it already without her adding to it.

"Well, at least she shouldn't find anything wrong with him," Natsu ventured optimistically. "After all, he's feeling well enough to make fun of me and call me out on my stolen quotes."

He looked back over at Gray and shook his head as he realized that the ice mage had produced that notebook again and was scribbling away in it once more. Natsu was itching to grab it and see what in the world Gray was writing, but he was still cautious after what had happened the previous day. He still lived in mortal terror of pushing Gray too far again.

"Speaking of stolen quotes," Natsu said suddenly, frowning as another thought struck him, "I told the landlady that we'd invite her over to dinner at some point. Damn, I forgot all about that. We should probably do that already." Then he grimaced. "Man, I don't even know what her name is. She surprised me too much and I forgot to ask. Damn."

"You didn't even think to ask her for her name?" Erza asked disapprovingly.

Natsu winced. "No," he admitted with a sigh.

"I just called her 'Obaa-san'," Gray murmured distractedly, still scribbling away. "She likes that."

Natsu's head whipped around as he stared at Gray again. "What did you just say?" he demanded.

Beside him, the others began whispering excitedly.

"Did he just remember something?" Lucy hissed quietly.

Gray finally tore his attention away from the notebook and focused on Natsu.

"What?" the ice mage asked, frowning in confusion.

"You just said that you called your landlady 'Obaa-san'," Natsu insisted. "How did you know that?"

Gray's confusion deepened and he knit his brows together as he tried to piece together what had happened. A lost look spread over his face.

"I don't know," he said finally. "Maybe I made it up."

"Sounds like something you actually remembered," Lyon disagreed.

Gray shrugged and scrawled something in the notebook. "It doesn't feel familiar."

Natsu watched him thoughtfully. Gray wasn't known for making things up or imagining things in his current state. Then again, he wasn't exactly known for remembering things either. Still, the dragon slayer was inclined to agree with Lyon that it seemed like Gray had actually had a brief flash of memory, but there was only one way to tell for sure. Luckily, this was a fact that was easily checkable. When Natsu invited the landlady to dinner, he could ask her about it, and she could tell him whether or not it was a true memory.

"You know," Natsu began thoughtfully, "usually when he seems to get one of these flashes of memory, it's when he's distracted and not paying attention to his surroundings. Maybe being distracted and detached from his immediate condition is letting some of his subconscious leak through or something."

Erza gave him a half-impressed, half-amused look. "That actually sounds pretty smart. Did you steal that from someone else too?"

Natsu scowled at her. "No," he replied with an irritated huff. "It's my own theory."

Erza opened her mouth to respond, but at that moment the doors to the guild were flung open. Natsu jerked around to see who the intruder was, and groaned as he spotted Porlyusica storming inside. Her hard eyes scraped over the gathered group of mages, summarily dismissing each one in turn until they landed on Natsu. They narrowed even further, and the dragon slayer gulped.

"Oh shit," he muttered as she stalked over.

"You have some explaining to do," she snapped, glowering at him.

He tried to give her a brief outline of what had happened the day before, minus some of the more terrible details, but it was difficult when she kept scowling at him and interrupting to make scathing comments. Satisfied that she had heard the basic details of what had gone wrong, she cut him off before he had a chance to mention any of Gray's seeming improvements. And as much as he wanted to tell her the good things too, he still had some sense of self-preservation. No way in hell was he going to interrupt her when she was in this mood.

"I'm going to take Gray to the other room and do a thorough examination to see what damage your foolish actions did," Porlyusica barked. "But don't think that this is the end of it. I'll expect to see you when I'm done, and we are going to have words."

And in a whirlwind of pink hair and flashing eyes, she swept a startled Gray into the backroom and disappeared from view.

"Well…That went pretty well," Lyon offered optimistically.

"It's not over," Natsu muttered glumly, sighing. "She's really going to tear into me after she's done with Gray."

"Better you than me," the other ice mage said, although he gave Natsu a sympathetic look.

The group started up a conversation about some new bakery that had opened up—a conversation that mostly interested Erza and Lucy—to distract themselves as they waited for Porlyusica to finish her examination. Natsu didn't pay much attention. His unwavering gaze was fixed on where Porlyusica and Gray had disappeared, and his whole body was taut with tension. He didn't really think that anything was physically wrong with Gray, but he needed confirmation that his stupidity hadn't hurt his friend any more than was already obvious. Natsu needed to know that nothing else was wrong with Gray, and he wouldn't be able to relax until he heard those words.

Sensing Natsu's tension, Happy moved to sit pressed against the dragon slayer's arm. Natsu absentmindedly stroked his fur in silent thanks, but he kept his eyes on the door. After nearly ten minutes, he decided that he couldn't take the waiting any longer. He stood abruptly, and everyone's eyes swung towards him.

"I'm going to go see if she's almost done," Natsu said. "I'm sure she's almost ready to chew me out by now."

Lucy bit her lip but nodded. "Good luck."

"I'll need it," Natsu muttered.

"I'll come with you," Happy said, determination coloring his voice as he spread his wings and came to hover by Natsu's shoulder. The dragon slayer smiled over at him, feeling just a little of the tension drain away. It was nice to have Happy by his side again. He hadn't had as much time as usual for the Exceed lately, and he had really missed having Happy around.

"Thanks, partner."

Happy nodded in acknowledgment and followed Natsu as the dragon slayer headed to the back of the guild. Natsu hesitated for just a moment outside the door, steeling himself. Then, taking a deep breath, he pushed the door open as quietly as possible. Porlyusica didn't notice their entrance, so Natsu stayed quiet and took a couple tentative steps into the room to watch her work.

"Have you been experiencing any more pain than usual?" she was asking Gray as she prodded him gingerly.

He watched her with a wary expression. "No."

"Has any of the pain you were experiencing before started to fade?"

"Yes."

Natsu took that to be a good sign, since Gray was giving actual answers instead of noncommittal responses now. The ice mage was answering all the questions, but his terseness and the uncomfortable stiffness in his posture made it clear that something about Porlyusica was bothering him. Natsu didn't know what that might be, since the healer was actually being a hell of a lot nicer to Gray than she was to anyone else. Maybe it was just that Gray was still uncomfortable around people he didn't know well.

"Are you sure?" Porlyusica asked. Some of the severe lines of her face had softened into something like worry as she studied Gray with almost kind eyes. "Because I can try mixing you up a different tonic for the pain if it's still bothering you."

"I'm fine," Gray said shortly, eyeing her cautiously.

Her voice seemed to take on an even gentler tone, and it was rather disconcerting from Natsu's perspective. She still wasn't being overly nice, but he had never seen her be this un-mean to anyone before.

"I could always—"

"Stop," Gray interrupted, frowning over at her. "Stop being so nice. It's weird."

She stared at him in shock, her mouth working soundlessly. Natsu stared as well, but then he started laughing. Porlyusica spun around and her eyes narrowed as she spotted him and Happy by the doorway. Gray looked over at them too, although he looked neither irritated nor amused.

"Has he done that before?" she demanded, instead of lecturing Natsu.

"What, seemed to randomly remember something?" the dragon slayer asked. "That started this morning, actually. The last week or so his progress seemed to really stall out, but this morning I woke up and found that he had gotten up early and cleaned the whole apartment. He even organized things exactly the way they were before I messed them all up. And there have been certain things he's said that suggest he occasionally semi-remembers something or other. He even lost his shirt earlier. But if you direct his attention towards it, he just gets confused and uncertain."

Porlyusica looked back at Gray with thoughtful eyes.

"Sounds like a good sign," she muttered. She lapsed into silence and continued to study the ice mage thoughtfully, and Gray shifted uncomfortably.

"I suppose that was rude," the ice mage said finally. "I'm sor—" Seeming to remember Natsu's directions on proper apologies, he cut himself off and tried again. "Well, you know."

Porlyusica waved him off dismissively, before turning back to Natsu.

"So everything's alright with Gray?" Happy asked hopefully.

"He seems physically fine," she agreed, her normal waspishness edging her voice again.

"About that," Natsu said, "we were wondering if it's really necessary for him to keep taking all those medicines. They don't seem to be doing much anymore."

The healer frowned slightly. "You can take him off the daily doses, but keep all of the medicines around in case something happens later."

"Alright," Natsu agreed, glad to not have to worry about that daily hassle anymore.

Porlyusica's eyes narrowed. "But just because he's fine doesn't mean that you're off the hook," she added with scowl.

Natsu winced instinctively as he realized what was coming. Porlyusica railed against him for several minutes as he fixed his gaze on the ground and shuffled his feet uncomfortably, until Gray, who they had mostly forgotten about at this point, suddenly tugged at the healer's sleeve. She looked over at him in surprise, her tirade temporarily forgotten. Natsu peered at Gray curiously as well as the ice mage released Porlyusica and ducked his head awkwardly.

"Maybe you could be a  _little_ nicer," Gray mumbled, his gaze sliding off to the side.

After the initial moment of shock, Natsu started laughing despite his current predicament, and Happy snickered as well. Gray's unexpected words even managed to startle a laugh out of Porlyusica, although she immediately cut herself off, pressing her lips together in a scowl to cover her slipup. Gray looked up in surprise and studied them uncertainly for a moment before one corner of his mouth quirked upwards in a hesitant half-smile.

Porlyusica obviously couldn't leave it at that since she needed to make up for the unexpected laugh and draw together the tattered remains of her dignity, but she also apparently took Gray's words to heart and cut off her harangue after only a few more minutes. Then she swept back out of the room, Natsu, Happy, and Gray on her heels.

"I'll be back in two or three weeks to give him another checkup," she announced coldly as she reentered the main room of the guild. Everyone immediately gave her their full and undivided attention, but she didn't even pause as she stalked through the crowd. "He's fine for now."

She pushed out the main doors, letting them slam shut behind her. Natsu let out a sigh of relief as she disappeared from view. She could be awfully intimidating when she wanted to be.

"How did it go?" Lucy asked Natsu.

He grimaced slightly at the memory. "Not as bad as it could have," he replied. Then he grinned. "Gray actually made her laugh."

There was a long pause as everyone gave him disbelieving looks.

"Porlyusica…laughed…?" Lucy asked slowly, shaking her head in a mixture of doubt and awe.

"It's true!" Happy said loyally, backing Natsu up.

Quite a few looks of amazement and awe were directed at Gray, who shifted uncomfortably and looked away.

"Never thought I'd see the day," Cana remarked, still looking a little shell-shocked.

"At least it didn't go too badly then," Lyon said optimistically.

Natsu winced again. "It still sucked," he grumbled.

"I can imagine," Erza said sympathetically. "And while you recover from that ordeal, I'll go ahead and take Gray for his walk."

"Alright. See if you can get him to remember anything else," Lucy said.

"It's great that he's finally improving again, and faster than before," Lyon added, his eyes filled with hope as he studied his adoptive brother. "Soon he'll start remembering more and more things, and then we'll get our Gray back."

There was a chorus of agreement, and everyone looked suddenly hopeful and excited. Everyone but Gray. Natsu watched the ice mage as he disappeared out the front doors at Erza's side, wondering why Gray seemed so unhappy to be remembering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well look, I didn't immediately jump right back into depressing stuff XD It was a pretty upbeat chapter, aside from that last ominous note. Because God forbid I write something entirely happy or fluffy and don't foreshadow something not-so-great happening.


	17. Ch 16-Natsu notices a developing pattern

**Chapter 16**

_(In which Natsu hosts another semi-awkward dinner and notices a developing pattern.)_

* * *

The next morning, Natsu found himself standing outside the door across from Gray's. The ice mage stood a half-step behind him, watching him silently as he put off the inevitable. The landlady had seemed nice enough before so Natsu really shouldn't have anything to worry about, and yet he still hesitated.

"Just knock," Gray advised. "She doesn't bite."

Natsu chuckled a little, but cast a half-baleful look over at his friend. "Yeah, well you aren't the one who's going to have to do all the talking."

Gray rolled his eyes. Leaning forward, he nudged Natsu aside and rapped on the door.

"What are you so afraid of? She was nice to you, wasn't she?" he asked as he retreated once more.

"I'm not afraid," Natsu protested sulkily. "And yeah, she was. It's just…Oh, I don't know."

In truth, he wasn't quite sure why he was nervous. Maybe it was because he still didn't know how to address her or treat her. Maybe it was because he had forgotten about her and her invitation for weeks and felt bad about it. Maybe it was because he was hoping that talking to her would help jog Gray's memory or, at the very least, confirm if some of the things Gray had been saying were really memories. Probably it was a mixture of all that, and perhaps it was exacerbated by the general sense of unease that had been bothering Natsu lately.

Footsteps were approaching from the other side of the door, so Natsu hurriedly pasted a friendly grin on his face. The door opened a moment later, to reveal the landlady standing there. Her eyes darted from him to Gray and then back again, and she smiled back.

"Well hello, Natsu, Gray. How are you doing today?" she asked pleasantly.

Natsu opened his mouth to respond, but Gray beat him to it.

"Good morning," the ice mage said, evidently remembering the lesson Natsu had given him the first time they had met the landlady. "I'm doing well. You?"

She blinked at him for a few seconds and then gave him a friendly smile. "Well, you really do seem to be doing better than last time I saw you. I'm doing quite well also. And how is your friend doing?"

Gray smirked. "He's nervous."

Without thinking about what he was doing, Natsu punched Gray lightly on the arm and scowled at him. Luckily, Gray didn't freak out at the sudden physical contact. His smirk only widened.

"That's enough out of you," Natsu grumbled.

"You said that you didn't want to do all the talking," the ice mage shot back.

Natsu shook his head and laughed. It was moments like these when he could almost pretend that everything was alright and Gray was normal, if only for a few seconds.

"I'm fine," he told the landlady, choosing to ignore Gray for the moment. "You mentioned that you might want to do dinner some time, once Gray was doing better?"

She had been watching their banter with no little amusement, but switched her attention back to Natsu and smiled again.

"Oh, would you like to do that soon? I  _am_ eager to hear about Gray's progress. When would be a good time for you?"

"Um, I was thinking tonight?" Natsu suggested hesitantly. "Unless that doesn't work for you."

She laughed. "I'm just a little old lady," she said, her eyes twinkling with amusement. "It's not like I have any pressing plans. Tonight is fine. You might consider inviting Lyon as well."

Natsu briefly considered that and decided that it was a good idea. Lyon would jump at the chance to spend some extra time with Gray, plus he already knew the landlady a little bit, which could make things exponentially less awkward.

"Yeah, I'll ask him." He frowned thoughtfully. "I might bring Happy too. He's been missing us." He turned to look at Gray. "I mean, if that's okay with you?"

Gray shrugged and looked unconcerned. "Sure."

Natsu stared at him for a moment, hoping for something more, but Gray didn't seem inclined to expound upon that. The ice mage's sudden life and energy had begun draining away again, leaving him mostly dispassionate once more. These flashes of the old Gray came and went, and it looked like this particular moment had already vanished.

Repressing a sigh, Natsu turned back to the landlady. "Does six o'clock work?" he asked her.

"Yes, that's fine," she answered. "Gray's apartment is bigger so we'll have more room for everyone if we eat and talk there, but I can make the food and bring it over."

"Oh, that's okay," Natsu said hurriedly. "I can cook."

"Really, it's not a problem," she said with a smile.

"But—"

"Just let her do it," Gray interrupted absently. "Her cooking is way better than yours."

Both Natsu and the landlady froze. They looked over at him in surprise, but Gray seemed as uninterested as ever. There was a brief silence, and then Gray looked back and forth between the two of them and shifted uncomfortably.

"What?" he asked.

"How do you know that her cooking is better?" Natsu asked slowly. "Did you remember something?"

Gray frowned and seemed to consider it, but quickly got that lost, confused look that he got every time he seemed to almost-remember something.

"No? I don't…I don't know." Gray suddenly looked intensely uncomfortable. "Maybe it's just because I know that you aren't a very good cook. Surely she must be better than you."

"Hey!" Natsu protested.

Gray fixed him with a flat stare, and the dragon slayer let his protestations die away. He had to admit that he wasn't a terribly good cook, but he hadn't realized that Gray had finally figured that out.

"Whatever," he muttered.

"Has he done that before?" the landlady asked curiously as she studied Gray.

Natsu nodded and quickly recounted a few of the things Gray had said or done over the past day or so that had hinted at him remembering something for at least an instant.

"And speaking of that," he added, remembering that there was something he had been meaning to ask her, "he said something like this about you yesterday. I commented that I hadn't even caught your name so I didn't know how to address you, and he said something about having always called you 'Obaa-san'. Is that…Is that true?"

Her eyes lit up a little. "Oh yes," she said fondly, nodding to herself. "I tried getting him to call me 'Obaa-chan' instead, but he was always so formal."

"Formal? Gray?" Natsu asked skeptically, raising an eyebrow.

Natsu had seen how Gray had treated Jii-chan and the older guild members, and nothing about that screamed of formality. But come to think of it, Gray had usually been pretty respectful of older people outside of the guild, unless he deemed them a nuisance. Gray could be polite and even downright charming if he wanted to be, but it was easy to forget that sometimes since he rarely saw the need to act that way with the guild. Which was perhaps unsurprising, given that Fairy Tail wasn't exactly known for its politeness or respectfulness.

"Yes, dear," the landlady confirmed. "Gray was always very respectful towards me."

Natsu nodded slowly as he digested that. Then he remembered the time and grimaced.

"Well, we had better get to the guild before anyone freaks out," he told her apologetically. "I'll drop by around six to help you carry things over?"

"That would be very nice, thank you," she replied. "Have fun with your friends."

"Thanks. See you later," Natsu said as he started out the door of the building, Gray on his heels. He paused for a second and looked back at her. "By the way, would you mind making something with fish? That's all Happy really wants to eat."

She laughed. "I know. Gray told me."

Oh yeah, Natsu had forgotten that Gray had been telling her about them before all this. He wondered how much she actually knew about them. It was a little disconcerting, actually. Then again, Natsu had the feeling that the only reason Gray had told her some of these things was because he had never expected her and Fairy Tail to come into contact with each other. And they probably never would have, if it hadn't been for this whole mess.

"Thank you," the dragon slayer said, leading Gray out of the building and letting the door slam shut behind them.

The two mages were already walking into the guild before a thought occurred to Natsu. He turned and frowned over at Gray.

"She still didn't tell me her name," he said in exasperation.

"So what?" Gray shrugged, not seeing the problem. "Names aren't that important."

Natsu paused and grimaced. No, Gray had made it pretty clear right from the very beginning that he didn't have any use for names. Come to think of it, Gray had failed to call anyone by their name ever since he had come back from the void, including himself. Well, aside from that one time when they were using Rufus and Meredy to try to help him remember, which hardly counted. Natsu knew that he must have monikers for some of them—such as the 'voice' or the 'screamers'—but he didn't really know how Gray distinguished between them in his head apart from those. The monikers he did have were more like descriptive labels based on defining characteristics as he saw them. Actual names didn't seem to interest Gray at all.

"Oh good, you're here," Erza said, noticing the two friends standing in the doorway. "Ready to go walking, Gray?"

The ice mage shrugged apathetically. Natsu hated how he could go from almost normal to his post-void apathy in a matter of moments.

"Why do you still go on walks with him?" Natsu asked Erza curiously. "I thought you started doing them because of his impaired movements, but he moves pretty normally these days."

The requip mage sighed and eyed Gray up and down. "That's how it started off, but there are other reasons to continue it. He's made a lot of progress in finding his way around the city, and I also take the opportunity to try talking to him."

"Is he actually talking to you?" Lucy asked her. "He's not always very…talkative."

Erza grimaced faintly.

"It depends on the day, really. Usually he doesn't talk much, but sometimes I can get a little out of him." She smiled a little. "Although I must say, he's gotten better ever since that incident with the memory magic and sensory link. He actually talked to me quite a bit yesterday."

"Oh, that's good!" Lucy exclaimed, her eyes lighting up.

It  _was_ good, but Natsu frowned anyway. Gray's progress was very encouraging and it seemed to be putting Erza in better spirits, but Natsu hoped that she'd be careful. Gray had good times and bad times. Sometimes he was almost normal and sometimes he was extremely withdrawn and cold. Right now, Gray looked like he might be more on the 'withdrawn' end of that spectrum.

"Just keep in mind that he still backslides sometimes," Natsu cautioned. He didn't want to discourage Erza, but he also didn't want her to get really upset if Gray's behavior wasn't as promising as it had been for most of yesterday.

The requip mage fixed him with a hard look. "I'm not that dense, Natsu," she said stiffly. "I am well aware of that fact."

"Sorry," the dragon slayer muttered as she and Gray headed out of the guild hall.

He understood that Erza needed these walks as her contribution to Gray's care, in the same way that Lyon gave him magic lessons and Natsu cared for him at home. She needed to feel as if she was contributing to Gray's rehabilitation as well, and he respected that. But he also couldn't shake the feeling that she might be setting herself up to get hurt too.

"She'll be alright," Lucy said reassuringly.

Natsu offered her a smile, before his gaze caught on Lyon and Happy. He turned his attention to them, remembering that he had an invitation to deliver.

"Hey Lyon, Gray's landlady invited you to dinner tonight with us," Natsu told the other ice mage. "And I told her that you'd be coming too, Happy."

"Yay!" Happy said excitedly, clapping his little paws together in anticipation. He was clearly excited to spend more time with Natsu, and the dragon slayer felt kind of bad that he had been neglecting the Exceed a little lately.

"What time?" Lyon asked.

"Why?" Natsu asked with an impish grin. "Do you have other pressing plans tonight?"

Lyon scowled at him. "No, but it would be nice to know what time I'm supposed to be there. You can be such a pain," he grumbled in irritation. "I don't know why Gray liked you so much."

"Honestly, me neither," Natsu said, half amused and half wistful. He shook off the sudden nostalgia. "We're supposed to meet at six. She's making the food but we're going to eat in Gray's apartment since it's bigger. I'll help her carry everything over."

"Will there be fish?" Happy asked, concern tinging his voice.

Natsu snorted. "Yeah, she said she'll make something with fish."

"Yay!"

The conversation turned to more mundane topics until Erza and Gray reappeared an hour or so later. Lyon's eyes lit up as soon as he saw the other ice mage.

"Oh good," he said. "Ready for another magic lesson, Gray?"

Gray shrugged again, no more interested in his magic today than any other day. Beside him, Erza looked rather disappointed herself, which made Natsu conclude that Gray's earlier liveliness really was well and truly gone for now.

"Is that a good idea?" Juvia asked. "Gray-sama has not practiced magic since the incident with Natsu-san."

The words were mild enough, but there was the barest hint of bite to the last part. Natsu winced a little. Juvia still hadn't completely gotten over the things he had said and done over the past few days.

"But he's been making good progress everywhere else. Maybe he'll start picking up magic faster now," Lucy said hopefully.

Judging by Gray's lack of interest, Natsu rather doubted that. Maybe if they could catch him in one of his good spells and give him a lesson then some of it would stick, but when he was so emotionally flat he didn't usually do so well.

Nevertheless, everyone watched with bated breath as Lyon started Gray on another lesson. It soon became clear that there were some improvements, but not as much as they had hoped. Gray's stance was better and all his hand movements were more natural and precise, but aside from the physical aspects, not much had improved. He  _did_ manage to create a small slab of ice while trying to make a shield, which was the first ice he had produced since the start of his lessons. Its appearance excited everyone for a time, but no more ice appeared after that and it was still a far cry from Gray's normal magic. It seemed like more of a fluke than anything else.

Lyon eventually gave up and ended the lesson, trying and failing to keep his disappointment off of his face.

"It's weird," he remarked to Natsu and the others. "His movements are much smoother and more natural than before. He's even making slight variations of the poses and gestures I'm showing him, and they're the same ones he made before all this happened. It's like his body can remember all the steps now, but he's still not reaching his magic."

"There was that one bit of ice," Lucy offered optimistically.

"Yeah, and it's good that he finally managed to make something with his magic," Lyon replied, "but he couldn't make anything after that. He seems to be having a hard time connecting to his magic."

"It'll get better," Natsu assured him.

"I hope so," Lyon answered unhappily. But it was clear that he was starting to get discouraged, and his frustration at not being able to make progress and help Gray was palpable. Natsu supposed that Gray's continued disinterest and lack of progress in his magic lessons was probably affecting Lyon even more than the rest of them.

But being discouraged didn't mean that anyone was giving up just yet. After all the great progress of yesterday, people kept trying to get Gray to talk or laugh or remember things for the rest of the day. They had little success. Gray became more and more reticent as the day wore on and people kept bothering him. He either stayed silent or offered monosyllabic responses, and occasionally pulled out his notebook to scribble something or other, but that was about it. People eventually picked up on his mood and drifted away to leave him in peace, but he still watched them warily and was mostly unresponsive.

Natsu eventually began wondering if he should just call this whole dinner off and postpone it to another day when Gray was acting more normal again, but when he hesitantly asked the ice mage about it, Gray just shrugged and said it was 'fine'. The dragon slayer was still a little uncertain about how wise this social event was, but he decided that it might do Gray some good. Besides, he didn't want to reschedule everything after the landlady had made all that food.

So he ultimately gathered up Gray, Lyon, and Happy around half past five and headed back to the apartment. Gray remained quiet and tense while the others helped the landlady transport the meal to his apartment and then settled down around the table to eat. Natsu was very glad that Lyon and Happy were there too, because it would have been a very awkward gathering indeed if it had only been him and the landlady trying to maintain a conversation. Since Lyon had already met the landlady on several occasions, he was more comfortable with her than Natsu was and had no problem chatting to her about anything ranging from small talk to the goings on of the past few weeks. Happy was his usual overexcited self, and Natsu fed off his energy and found it much easier to hold a natural conversation when he had the trusty feline to rely on.

Even though he had been put at ease by the company and conversation, Natsu kept an eye on Gray as they ate and talked. The younger ice mage stayed reticent and uncommunicative for a while, but he eventually seemed to start relaxing a little. There was still more than a touch of uneasiness in his face and posture and he didn't suddenly become overly talkative, but he did eventually start answering questions more fully and occasionally adding a comment of his own.

At one point the landlady also talked about her grandchildren, and Natsu and the others listened with interest as she told them about the humorous escapades of the two young children. They found the stories of the kids' mischief to be rather entertaining, but at a lull in the conversation Gray suddenly asked "What about the third?", which confused everyone until the landlady explained that she had a third grandchild as well. She hadn't mentioned this child in the conversation up to this point because he was currently staying with his parents many miles away and she hadn't heard from him or his family in a while, but Gray seemed to have somehow remembered his existence anyway. This made everyone excited, not least of all the landlady, but Gray adamantly insisted that he didn't know anything about the old woman's family and wasn't quite sure where his comment had sprung from. They badgered him about it for a couple minutes, testing his memory until Natsu finally called everyone off.

Gray had become more and more uncomfortable and withdrawn as the interrogation went on, and Natsu firmly suggested that they leave him alone for a bit. The conversation was reluctantly steered towards other topics, but Natsu kept an eye on his friend. At one point Gray pulled out that infuriating notebook and quickly scribbled something into it before snapping it shut and whisking it out of view once more, but aside from that, the ice mage seemed to shut down completely. He barely spoke another word for the rest of dinner, didn't eat a bite after that point, and stared blankly at the table instead of following the conversation like he normally would have.

This bothered Natsu immensely, because it seemed to be a complete regression to Gray's immediate post-void withdrawal and was at odds with all the progress he had been making. The dragon slayer could acknowledge the pattern that these regressive phases tended to happen after Gray's almost-memories, but that worried him. It made it seem like progress would inevitably be followed by these unresponsive periods. One step forward, two steps back.

The others noticed Gray's mood as well, and they tried to make light conversation and talk about humorous stories in an attempt to get him interested again. They all moved out to sit on the living room couches after they had finished eating so that they could talk a little longer before retiring for the night. It mostly devolved into banter between Natsu, Lyon, and Happy, with the landlady and Gray as spectators. Gray began showing a little more interest now that he was sure that the others were leaving him out of everything. His eyes followed the path of conversation again, and he even smiled faintly once or twice at the teasing.

Once Gray seemed more comfortable again, Lyon began filling in the landlady on some of the steps they had taken in Gray's rehabilitation and on some of the progress the younger ice mage had made. Natsu watched Gray carefully to make sure that nothing triggered him, but his friend seemed fine as long as they weren't talking about things he almost remembered.

"Oh, and I've been giving him magic lessons too," Lyon added.

"How is that going?" the landlady asked curiously.

Natsu grimaced a little. "Not so great," he admitted. "But he's doing a little better than he was before. His stance and gestures are good, but he's not producing much ice."

"He's still got a long way to go," Lyon agreed. Then he smirked. "But that's nothing new. I was always way stronger than him anyway."

For the first time in over an hour, something actually drew a reaction from Gray.

"Like hell you are!" he spat indignantly, scowling over at Lyon.

Everyone was startled into silence. Natsu watched Gray carefully. His friend had never shown any interest in magic up to this point, so he had to assume that this was another one of those subconscious responses pushing through. Sure enough, Gray's indignation quickly drained away and he shrank back into the couch as watched them all with wide, wary eyes.

Thankfully everyone had enough tact to brush aside his exclamation as if they hadn't even heard it, and kept right on talking. Somehow the conversation eventually turned to all their favorite memories of Gray instead. Natsu was initially hesitant about this particular change in topic, but quickly got sucked into the conversation and was distracted, even though he knew better. They should have all known better, really, but it had just kind of happened on its own and they were all missing the way Gray had been, and maybe they couldn't really help themselves. They needed a break from all the heartache of the last few weeks and needed to remember the good times when Gray had still been himself and not this hollow shell, and if Gray hadn't still been sitting in the room silently like a half-forgotten ghost, this would have been a good enough way to go about it.

They talked about their favorite missions they had done with Gray, their favorite insults and inside jokes they had had together, and, in Natsu's case, their favorite brawls and pranks with him. Lyon also talked a little bit about his childhood with Gray, and the landlady had a few stories of her own to share. Natsu was so caught up in these fascinating stories about his best friend that he had never heard, that he almost forgot Gray himself was in the room until the younger ice mage stood up abruptly.

Everyone fell silent and looked at him uncertainly. Natsu immediately cursed his own stupidity as he saw the look on Gray's face. He hadn't thought that they could make the ice mage any more uncomfortable and withdrawn than after they had pestered him about his earlier comment, but he had been wrong. Natsu should have realized that talking about the things Gray had done before the void would make his friend uncomfortable. It wasn't like this was the first time something like this had happened.

"Gray?" Natsu asked hesitantly when his friend didn't move or make a sound for several seconds. "Are you alright?"

Gray seemed almost startled for a second before his gaze swung to Natsu and his expression went blank.

"I'm going to go wash the dishes," the ice mage said tonelessly.

He turned and disappeared into the kitchen, his gait stiffer and jerkier than it had been in weeks. They all stared after him, and after a second they heard the sound of running water and clinking dishes.

"Damn," Natsu cursed quietly. "I should've known better."

"About what, dear?" the landlady asked, her voice more subdued than usual as she stared at the place where Gray had vanished.

"Gray doesn't like it when we talk about how he was before he lost all his memories," Happy replied somberly. "He gets all quiet and dead-looking."

"At least this time he actually went to go do something instead of just shutting down and staring at the wall?" Lyon offered uncertainly.

Natsu shrugged.

"Yeah, he's been getting all obsessive about cleaning lately. I must drive him crazy since I'm such a messy person." He glanced up at the clock, less because he really needed to check the time and more because he needed an excuse to get rid of everyone. "It's getting a little late and Gray is getting tired of having company," the dragon slayer said as diplomatically as possible. "Shall we call it a night?"

"Of course, dear," the landlady said, immediately standing. "It was nice of you to invite me over for dinner, and it was nice to see you, Gray, and Lyon again. And it was a pleasure to finally meet you, Happy. Goodnight, everyone."

"Goodnight," they all chorused as they walked her to the door.

"I'll stop by your apartment and bring you back all your dishes tomorrow," Natsu told her as she stepped out the door. "Might as well wash them first."

"Thank you, dear."

She disappeared into her apartment, and Lyon stepped outside as well.

"'Night, Natsu. Keep an eye on Gray."

"I will," the dragon slayer agreed.

"Do I have to go already?" Happy wailed, catapulting himself into Natsu's arms and wrapping his paws around the dragon slayer. "You've been gone so long!"

"I'm sorry, Happy," Natsu apologized, patting the little cat.

"Why don't you just let him stay here?" Lyon asked, eyeing the two of them. "I've been living in your house for weeks now, and I'm pretty confident that I can handle it alright by myself."

Natsu peered at him uncertainly. On the one hand, he would love to have Happy around again and it would definitely make the Exceed happy. On the other, it would be rude to leave Lyon in their house alone.

"I don't know…" Natsu hedged.

"Unless you think that I'm going to steal your things?" Lyon asked dryly, arching an eyebrow.

Natsu smirked a little. Ah well, when had he ever really cared about being polite anyway?

"Nah, it's not that. You sure you'll be able to find everything you need in the cabinets? We wouldn't want you to starve."

Lyon's expression twisted in mock disgust. "Those cabinets are ridiculous," he grumbled. "But I think I can manage."

"Well, good luck then," Natsu said, giving in. "Let me know if you need anything."

"Thank you, Lyon!" Happy exclaimed, detaching from Natsu so that he could bowl the other mage over with a hug. Lyon was startled, but recovered quickly. Natsu noticed that he gave Happy a fond smile as he patted the Exceed's head and then pushed him off.

"Yeah, yeah. Now you can annoy Natsu with all your complaining," the older mage said good-naturedly as he waved goodbye and headed out into the night.

Natsu looked thoughtfully between Lyon's retreating form and Happy's ecstatic face for a moment.

"You two are getting along a lot better now, are you?" he asked, recalling that Happy had been less than thrilled at being left with Lyon before.

"Yeah, he's not so bad," Happy said cheerfully.

To be honest, Natsu had to admit that his opinion of the other man had shifted in a similar fashion to Happy's. He'd been pretty irritated with Lyon at first, but the other mage had grown on him once they'd come to an understanding. The dragon slayer shut the door and smiled a little.

"No, he's not," he agreed. He glanced back towards the kitchen, where they could still hear Gray washing dishes. "What do you say we go help Gray dry those dishes and put them away?"

"Aye sir!" Happy agreed, too excited by the prospect of living with Natsu again to be too bothered by a little extra work.

Natsu warned Happy to try to stay somewhat quiet and unobtrusive for the night until they determined how well Gray would take his presence, and he was still a little hesitant about having Happy over while the ice mage was so withdrawn. However, Gray didn't seem bothered by Happy's presence and took the new addition to the household in stride, although he didn't become any more talkative.

The ice mage retired early, shutting himself in his room shortly after they finished with the dishes. Natsu didn't complain. He was getting the feeling that Gray needed some time to himself, for whatever reason. Hopefully Gray would be more communicative and less withdrawn tomorrow once he'd calmed down again. Natsu would have to just wait and see, because it wasn't like he could really do anything else about the issue right now.

Luckily, now that Happy was staying over, Natsu had someone to talk to even though Gray had shut down. The dragon slayer and his Exceed talked in low voices for a couple hours, catching up on all the little things they had missed while they had been living apart. Even though they still saw each other every day at the guild and talked, it was amazing how many little details had been overlooked when they'd tried to fill each other in. So they talked for a while until they finally started feeling the late hour and decided to go to bed. They both stretched out on the couch, and fell asleep within minutes.

When Natsu swam back to consciousness a few hours later, it took him a minute to figure out what had woken him. Sitting up with a yawn, careful not to disturb the still-sleeping feline curled by his side, he peered about the room blearily, narrowing his eyes in an attempt to make out the shadowy shapes in the almost nonexistent light. There was a slight sound behind him and his head whipped around. Something moved in the darkness, but then the shadowy figure stilled.

After a moment, Natsu's eyes adjusted enough to make out Gray standing there. The ice mage had apparently paused when he'd realized that Natsu had woken up, and was now watching the dragon slayer soundlessly, his dark eyes glittering faintly.

"Gray?" Natsu mumbled around a yawn, keeping his voice low for fear of waking Happy. "What are you doing?"

Gray shrugged. "Nothing, really."

"Couldn't sleep?" Natsu asked, not willing to leave it at that. This was kind of strange behavior from Gray, and given how withdrawn and unhappy he had been earlier that day, Natsu was inclined to be at least slightly concerned.

Gray shrugged again. "I woke up," he said evenly.

Natsu frowned. Gray tended to like sleeping, for reasons Natsu didn't particularly want to acknowledge. The dragon slayer would have expected that if Gray woke up, he would go right back to sleep. But then again, he must have gotten up early when he went on his cleaning rampage a couple days ago. Maybe he hadn't been able to fall back asleep then either?

"You aren't going to just go clean things, are you?" Natsu asked suspiciously.

"No, I don't think so," Gray replied, tilting his head thoughtfully as he considered the question.

"Then what  _are_ you going to do?"

"I don't know." Gray's expression was hard to make out in the dark and his voice was emotionless, but Natsu thought he might have detected the faintest edge of frustration.

"But you don't want to just go back to sleep?" Natsu pressed.

Gray remained silent for a moment before he shook his head slowly. "I don't think so."

Well, this was about the least informative conversation ever. Between all the 'I don't know's and 'I don't think so's and 'nothing's, Natsu hadn't the faintest idea of what was going on in Gray's head. He wondered if Gray did either.

"Well…" Natsu pondered the issue for a few moments, wondering what he should do now. "Would you like to go walking then? Outside? You always used to—" He cut himself off with an effort, worried that bringing up Gray's pre-void self would make his friend shut down again. "Sometimes I like to go walking when I can't sleep. I'll come with you if you want."

Gray didn't respond immediately. Natsu stayed quiet and didn't press for an immediate answer, instead choosing to let his friend think through the suggestion and come to his own decision.

"Okay," Gray said finally, a hint of uncertainty lingering in his voice.

"Alright, well go make sure you're dressed to go outside," Natsu said with a sigh. Not that it probably mattered at this point. He didn't know how late it was, but he doubted that there would be many people up and about.

Gray hesitated for a moment before nodding. His shadowy form slipped back into the yawning maw of the darkened doorway behind him. Natsu stifled another yawn and carefully worked himself off the couch without waking Happy. It looked like he wasn't going to be getting any more sleep for a while even though he was dead tired, and he didn't see why the Exceed should have to share the same fate.

Pulling some rumpled clothing on in a halfhearted attempt to make himself look at least somewhat presentable, Natsu stumbled over to the other side of the room and squinted blearily at the clock. Four in the morning. Of course. Screw the clothing; at this point he might as well go dancing through the city naked. It's not like anyone would see him. What the hell was Gray doing up at such an ungodly hour? Natsu groaned softly and scrubbed at his face with his hands in an attempt to wake himself up.

Gray seemed to suddenly materialize out of the darkness next to the dragon slayer, who jumped about a foot into the air and hurriedly clapped a hand over his mouth to smother his startled yelp. Natsu stared at his remarkably unruffled friend with wide eyes as he tried to calm down. Well, he was certainly awake now.

"You almost scared the life out of me," Natsu muttered finally, once his racing heartbeat finally started to slow down a bit. The barest hint of a smile flickered over Gray's face before vanishing again, and then the ice mage just stared at Natsu flatly. "Well, let's go."

Natsu tiptoed across the apartment, wincing every time he bumped into something in the dark. Gray followed soundlessly, and Natsu thought it a little unfair that he could move around so silently. Grabbing the key to the apartment, Natsu let himself and Gray out and then locked the door behind them, grimacing at the faint snick of the key turning in the lock. He really hoped that Happy didn't wake up before they got back. He didn't want to panic the Exceed on his first night here.

Outside it was a little brighter with the streetlamps and stars, but Gray's expression was just as unreadable as before. As the pair started down the street, Natsu stole uncertain glances at his friend, trying to gauge what kind of mood he was in. Yesterday Gray had been in a pretty good mood for most of the day, but earlier today—well, Natsu supposed that it was yesterday now—he had been withdrawn and uncomfortable for the most part. Natsu didn't want to go straight back to that wariness.

Things felt different in the moonlight, as if the night was a short break from normal reality, a temporary lull where anything could happen, even something magical. Not just the daylight kind of magic, but the life-changing kind that was somehow much more powerful, but also so much more ephemeral, than any trick with fire or ice or fancy golden keys. The kind that couldn't just be conjured up by a mage and wasn't really magic in the sense of the power they used on a daily basis, but which was still fantastical and entrancing and somehow magical all the same.

Which seemed silly to think about logically, but hadn't it been in one of these nighttime meetings—after Natsu had pushed Gray too far and had thought that he'd lost him for good—that a little piece of magic had happened? That time Gray had been more understanding, more responsive, more kind, even, and the next day was when he'd started improving in leaps and bounds. If that wasn't magic, what was? Natsu didn't necessarily have such high expectations for tonight, but at the very least, he didn't want Gray to be as uneasy now as he had been earlier. Natsu wanted to call a time out from that and let the moonlit magic work its spell on them.

"Why don't we call a truce?" the dragon slayer said finally, his hushed voice breaking the silence that smothered the sleeping streets. Gray looked over at him and raised an eyebrow in question, so Natsu hurried to explain. "We still want you to get your memories back, of course, so we'll have to keep talking and trying things later, but just for tonight, I won't talk about the past if you try not to get so distant and withdrawn again. Deal?"

Gray considered that for a moment before nodding. "Okay," he said. "I'll try."

Which was about as much as Natsu could reasonably hope for right now. It seemed promising that Gray was at least willing to try. On the other hand, topics of conversation were now severely limited. But Natsu had only promised not to talk about the past, so maybe he could get away with some other things.

"Why didn't you want to go back to sleep?" he asked finally. "I thought that you liked sleeping because…" He swallowed and felt himself grimace in distaste. "Because it was the closest thing you could get to the void."

For a second he was worried that even this would make Gray get defensive, but the ice mage only hummed thoughtfully and paused for a moment to come up with the right answer. Luckily, it didn't seem to make him any more uncomfortable.

"It's still not the same," he said eventually. "They aren't the same thing. The void is forever, but sleep is not. In the void there is nothing, because the void is all there is. With sleep, even if it feels almost like the void, some part of you always knows that you'll wake up again and things will still exist."

Natsu swallowed hard again and looked away. Gray didn't often talk about the void, but when he did, it never got any easier for Natsu to hear. Gray didn't display any overt emotion now to give Natsu a clue as to what he might be thinking, and it bothered the dragon slayer. Probably because he could still remember some of the things Gray had said or implied when he'd first been rescued from the void.

"Do you…?" Natsu trailed off and bit his lip, not sure whether or not he really wanted to ask this question. He was afraid of the answer.

"What?" Gray asked when the silence stretched on for too long.

Natsu let out a shaky breath. "Do you still wish that I left you in the void?"

Gray stayed silent for several long seconds, frowning at the cobblestones beneath his feet. He didn't speak again until they had reached the end of one darkened street and turned the corner to start down the next.

"Sometimes," he said finally.

Natsu grimaced and his heart clenched painfully. He didn't want to hear that. But Gray hadn't just said 'yes' either, which must be an improvement from before. Or Natsu hoped so, at least.

"And the rest of the time?"

"The rest of the time…" Gray pursed his lips and his eyes narrowed slightly. "The rest of the time, I don't know."

It was better than just saying that he wanted to be back in the void again, but it still wasn't exactly great. It occurred to Natsu that Gray seemed to be unsure of a lot of things these days, even when—perhaps  _especially_  when—it came to himself.

In any case, Natsu didn't want to talk about the void anymore.

"Can I ask about the notebook then?" he asked.

Gray's face immediately closed off and his posture took on a rigid, defensive demeanor. Natsu hurriedly backtracked. He hadn't wanted this. At least for tonight, he didn't want Gray to do this again.

"I'm sorry," Natsu babbled, wringing his hands together anxiously. "We don't have to talk about it. Please just don't shut down on me. I'm sorry."

Natsu hadn't realized that he'd stopped right in the middle of the street until Gray paused as well to look back at him. The ice mage remained motionless for a few seconds, but then let out a breath as some of his defensiveness melted away.

"It's okay," he said quietly. "Come on."

He turned away and started walking again. Natsu hurried to catch up to him, breathing a ragged sigh of relief. It looked like Gray was going to stand by his word and at least try not to shut down again. Natsu was grateful for that.

Still, the dragon slayer was terrified of saying the wrong thing, afraid that one wrong word might set his friend off. Plus, there really just weren't very many safe topics of conversation, so he and Gray wandered the streets in silence for a few minutes. Gray didn't say much and seemed a little distracted, but he didn't look like he was uncomfortable with Natsu's presence either, which was a good sign. Natsu surreptitiously studied his face in the moonlight, but couldn't make heads or tails of his expression. Eventually the silence got too heavy and the dragon slayer had to break it again.

"What are you thinking?" he asked Gray curiously.

Gray's head jerked up so that he could look at Natsu, but any sign of surprise faded after only a second.

"Nothing," he said.

Natsu frowned. "You know, I always used to ask you—" He broke off with difficulty, clamping his jaws shut to prevent the traitorous words from spilling out. "Sorry. Never mind."

Gray studied his face quietly for a moment. "You used to ask me what?"

"It's from before," Natsu mumbled, shaking his head. He'd told Gray that he wouldn't talk about before, so he wouldn't.

"I know."

"So never mind."

Gray let out a harsh breath. "Go ahead and tell me."

Natsu frowned. "But…"

"You want to tell me, don't you?" Gray asked with a sigh, his unreadable eyes meeting Natsu's confused ones steadily.

"Well, yes, I suppose so, but—"

"Well then, go ahead," Gray interrupted, tearing his gaze away from Natsu's to frown at the ground again.

"I told you that I wouldn't talk about it."

"And now I'm saying that you can."

Natsu hesitated and frowned at Gray in confusion. He didn't understand why his friend was suddenly okay with talking about the past, asking for it, even. Gray didn't seem to be at all curious about what Natsu had to say, so it wasn't like he was just dying to know the story. If anything, he looked…resigned, maybe. Like he knew that this was what Natsu needed and had come to the conclusion that the past could never entirely be kept closed off as long as the dragon slayer was around. Or maybe there was another reason for the odd behavior entirely.

Well, if Gray was going to insist on it, then Natsu would tell him. The dragon slayer just really, really hoped that it didn't end up making him withdraw again.

"It's just that…Well, you used to get all quiet and thoughtful sometimes," Natsu explained, staring sightlessly at the pavement. "I'd ask you what you were thinking, and you'd always make up the most random things you could think of. You could come up with them almost instantly. Sometimes it would be something making fun of me, sometimes it was just the silliest, strangest thing you could think of off the top of your head. Whatever it was, somehow we'd always get distracted with it and I'd kind of forget that you'd been moody because I'd get sucked up in teasing or silly conversation.

"Then there was this one time when I just woke up one day and was feeling really lonely and sad because of Igneel's—my father's—disappearance. It wasn't even an anniversary or anything so you couldn't have known, but I guess I was quieter than usual, and it was your turn to ask me what was on my mind. I couldn't just come up with something spur-of-the-moment clever like you normally did, so I just said 'nothing'." Natsu paused for a moment, the memory tugging painfully at his heart.

"Of course you teased me about it," he continued, his voice getting quieter and quieter. "You know, how obviously my brain was empty if I wasn't thinking of anything, and all that. But it wasn't the mean kind of teasing. It was the fun kind and you managed to distract me with it. Then you somehow involved me in other silly conversations as well and then dragged me out on an impromptu job and didn't let me out of your sight all day. It was actually—it was actually a lot of fun. I didn't even realize until later that night that you'd managed to distract me all day and make me feel better. I'd been lonely and sad and you'd somehow managed to completely turn that around because even though I didn't tell you what was wrong, you somehow figured it out anyway."

Natsu fell into a pensive silence for a few moments.

"He sounds nice," Gray ventured uncertainly, when the silence dragged on too long.

"Who is—?" Natsu broke off with a grimace, realizing that Gray just still wasn't equating himself with who he had been before. It hurt, but Natsu didn't want to dwell on it right now. That was an issue to work out in the daylight hours.

"Yeah," he said instead. "But now it makes me think, because I know you had a lot of problems with your past and things, and you'd brood over it sometimes, even if you never told us you did. So now I have to wonder how many times I could have tried to help you when I noticed you were quieter than usual, but I didn't because I let you distract me with your silly answers and convinced myself that you were alright.

"I guess…I guess I'm just wondering if your 'nothing' now is really that you're not thinking about anything, or if it's my kind of 'nothing', when something's bothering me but I don't want to tell anyone what it is."

He finally glanced back up at Gray, to see that the ice mage was studying him expressionlessly. The silence stretched on for several long seconds.

"You're crying," Gray observed finally.

Natsu frowned. "I'm not—"

He automatically reached up to touch his cheek, and broke off when his fingers came away wet. He stared uncomprehendingly at the tear glittering in the moonlight as it slowly dripped down his finger. Natsu didn't cry very often, but when he did, he was at least aware of it. He hadn't even noticed this time. Maybe it was the stress of the day, maybe it was the emotions talking about the past had stirred up. Mostly it was because Natsu missed his best friend so much it hurt.

"I make you unhappy too, then?" Gray asked, his voice impassive although his lips tightened almost imperceptibly.

Natsu tore his gaze away from the unexpected tear to stare at Gray instead. It took him a second to remember that Gray had once asked if he made Lyon sad. The dragon slayer grimaced.

"No," he said harshly, fighting back new tears. "Never."

"Then why are you crying?"

Natsu opened his mouth to say something— _anything_ —to reassure Gray that he wasn't the problem, but forced himself to stop and really consider the question. He thought that maybe Gray deserved a real answer. The truth was that Natsu wasn't exactly sure. There were probably a lot of reasons that he was crying right now, but he didn't want to give Gray the laundry list. If he had to pick one thing…

"I think that maybe it's because I didn't help you the way I should have back then and I want to do better now, but I don't know how to help you and it feels like there's nothing I can do," he said slowly, testing each word as he spoke it. They felt right.

Gray didn't reply immediately, so silence engulfed the duo once more.

"Talk," the ice mage said finally.

"Huh?" Natsu blinked at Gray uncomprehendingly, at a loss.

"Just talk," Gray said, frowning at the ground. "About anything. About yourself, if you want. Just not about me. Not about how I was, not about how I am, not about me at all. Just talk about something else."

Natsu opened his mouth to ask why, but then slowly closed it again. He didn't know where Gray's random request had come from, but he'd certainly honor it. Gray rarely asked for anything anymore, and Natsu would give him whatever little bit he could.

So Natsu talked. As they wandered the empty streets, Natsu talked about whatever came to mind, as long as it didn't involve Gray in any way. He talked a little bit about his childhood with Igneel and his father's disappearance, about jobs he'd gone on without Gray and trouble he'd gotten into with his impulsiveness and stubbornness. He talked a bit about the others too and frequently got sidetracked on topics that had nothing to do with anything.

Gray stayed silent and kept his eyes fixed on the ground. Natsu was willing to let that go since Gray wasn't usually all that talkative to begin with, but he soon became aware that it didn't look like the ice mage was even paying attention at all. Gray's eyes were vacant and glazed over as he walked, and he showed not the slightest interest in what Natsu was saying.

The dragon slayer paused and let his voice die out as he wondered why Gray had asked him to talk if he wasn't even going to listen. The moment silence filled the air again, Gray looked up and frowned at Natsu.

"You're not even listening to me, are you?" Natsu asked. He wasn't exactly hurt, but maybe a little disappointed. Gray just shrugged. "Why am I even doing this then?"

Gray met Natsu's eyes steadily. "Because I asked you to," he said quietly.

Natsu stared at him for a moment and then looked away, letting out a shuddering breath. Yes, that was why he was doing it, and that was why he would continue to do it. He didn't know why Gray had requested this or even whether it was helping anything at all, but he'd do it for as long as Gray wanted him to.

So Natsu took up his monologue again, his quiet voice the only sound in the still night air. As they continued to walk, he finally began noticing a gradual change in Gray. It was so subtle that perhaps it wasn't a surprise that he had missed it up to this point. He hadn't even realized that Gray had been so rigid and tense, but now he was slowly starting to relax, his stress slowly ebbing away. Natsu wondered what had had him so on edge.

Gray suddenly deviated from their path and headed into the park. Natsu followed behind him with a confused frown, and sat down next to him when the ice mage settled onto one of the wooden benches. He hadn't even realized that he had stopped talking until Gray looked back over at him and made an encouraging hand gesture.

Natsu resumed his one-sided conversation and watched Gray curiously. His friend was just staring out at the darkened park blankly, but he slowly began relaxing further, slumping back against the bench. Natsu hid a smile as he realized that Gray was beginning to fall asleep right there, his breathing starting to deepen as his eyes began closing for longer and longer each time he blinked. After a few minutes, he finally fell asleep leaning against Natsu's shoulder.

Natsu stopped talking once he was sure that Gray was really out, and he studied Gray's sleeping face in the moonlight. The ice mage looked a lot more peaceful when he was asleep, and with his eyes closed, it wasn't quite as obvious that he was no longer exactly the same person he had been before.

Then another thought struck Natsu and he cursed quietly. How the hell was he going to get Gray back to the apartment? Gray wasn't really  _heavy_ , but he wasn't exactly light either, and carrying him back was liable to result in him getting woken up one way or another. Natsu also wasn't willing to spend all night out here on this hard bench. He was still dead tired and missing the couch—which was starting to seem a lot more comfortable at this point—and all he wanted to do was go back to sleep and not wake up for hours. He'd certainly gotten himself into a predicament.

He considered the best course of action. He should probably just wake Gray up so that they could walk back to the apartment and go to sleep where they were  _supposed_ to sleep, but…Natsu also didn't really want to break this moment. There was something almost comforting about having Gray leaning on him, even if only in sleep. Gray didn't exactly shun all physical contact, but he didn't seek it out either and most of the time everyone was too worried about his reactions to really initiate it. It wasn't like Gray and Natsu had ever been very 'touch-y' people, but there had always been at least a little bit of contact, when they fought if nothing else. Natsu hadn't really realized that he'd missed it so much. It was nice to feel Gray so heavy and solid and real right now, when usually Natsu was too afraid to touch in case he broke.

The dragon slayer absently brushed some dark hair out of Gray's face, his fingers lightly ghosting over his friend's pale skin. The ice mage stirred a little, making a faint sighing sound and scrunching up his face slightly as he curled into Natsu a little more, almost like a cat. Natsu felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. It was almost…cute. Gray would be mortified.

Then the ice mage's eyes blinked open, and, for just a second, Natsu felt his heart sink because those eyes broke the illusion that this was the old Gray with all of his memories. The  _old_ Gray would be mortified. Natsu wasn't sure about this new one.

He hadn't been lying when he'd said that Gray didn't make him unhappy. The things Gray said or did could sometimes be disheartening and they could hurt, but they also weren't Gray's fault. Natsu could blame Mard Geer and his curse for that—and, in his darkest moments, himself—but never Gray. Gray might have changed through no fault of his own and he might not be exactly the same person he had been before, but Natsu cared about him anyway because, in the end, he was still Gray even if he wasn't the same.

Natsu swallowed hard and pulled his hand away from Gray's face, looking away as a wave of sudden grief and embarrassment swept over him.

"Sorry," he murmured. "I didn't mean to wake you up."

"It's okay." Gray pulled away from Natsu and blinked around at the park uncomprehendingly for a moment. "Where—?" He shook his head. "We can go back now."

Natsu nodded and stood, Gray following suit, and they headed back towards the apartment.

"Should I keep talking?" Natsu asked.

Gray tilted his head and considered the question for a few seconds.

"No," he said finally. "I don't think I need it anymore."

The dragon slayer frowned at him curiously, wondering why he would have 'needed' Natsu to ramble on and on, especially since he hadn't even been paying attention, but then shrugged it off. He was tired and Gray was tired, and he doubted that either of them really felt up to holding a real conversation right now. They walked back to the apartment in companionable silence, and Natsu breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that Happy was still asleep on the couch.

"'Night, Gray," the dragon slayer mumbled, yawning, as the ice mage headed for the bedroom.

Gray paused and looked back. "Goodnight. Sleep on the couch, not on the floor."

Natsu stared at him for a moment and then smiled. "Alright."

But then he sobered as he remembered the other worry that had been nagging at him. Tonight might be something of anomaly, a little like their other nighttime chat, but that raised the question of what tomorrow would be like. Last time Gray had improved a lot, but now when he seemed to be regressing…What would tomorrow hold?

"Gray, tomorrow what will—?"

"I don't know," Gray interrupted. His hand tightened on the doorframe and he stared blankly at the ground for a moment before turning away from Natsu. "I don't know."

Natsu stared after him for several long minutes after he'd disappeared into the bedroom and shut the door. He didn't know how—or if—Gray knew what he'd been trying to ask, but the answer was something that he had been both expecting and dreading at the same time. Given the fluctuations in Gray's behavior and progress over the past two days, no one, perhaps not even Gray himself, knew what to expect anymore.

It was like a game of Russian roulette that Natsu wasn't sure he could win. But there was nothing to be done about it now, so Natsu settled down to sleep on the couch with Happy, praying that in the morning he'd hear the click of an empty chamber instead of getting a bullet through the heart.

* * *

Natsu had initially been concerned about adding Happy to the mix, especially since his arrival had loosely coincided with the appearance of Gray's backsliding episodes, but his doubt quickly faded. He was very glad of the little cat's presence over the next few days once he realized the new cycle they had settled into.

After the temporary reprieve offered by Natsu and Gray's early morning jaunt through the city, their lives fell into a pattern that revolved around Gray's rapidly shifting moods. It soon became obvious that in addition to having certain topics that set him off, Gray also had good days and bad days now. On good days he would laugh and smile and joke around, and it would almost feel like Natsu had his best friend back. On bad days he would revert to an almost void-like state where he was almost entirely emotionless and uninterested in anything.

Those days were the worst, because it felt like all the progress they had fought so hard to achieve was lost. Natsu had almost _—almost_ —forgotten how disheartening and cold and dispassionate Gray had been back when they had first pulled him out of the void, but he was getting reminders now. It wasn't always quite that bad, but sometimes looking at Gray was like looking into the eyes of a soulless body. Natsu was especially thankful to have Happy around at times like that, so that at least he had the Exceed for companionship and as a co-conspirator as they tried to figure out how to get Gray back to normal.

Most of the time these alternating moods shifted back and forth once or twice in a day, sometimes in response to something tactless someone said and sometimes in response to apparently nothing at all. But it was quite often that one of those two states predominated on any given day, which is why Natsu had taken to classifying days as 'good' or 'bad'—empty chamber or bullet. Gray still continued to display random snippets of memory, but they seemed to distress him more and more as they continued to appear, and he became even touchier about people talking about his pre-void self or pushing him to remember things.

These signs all pointed to the fact that Gray was steadily becoming increasingly stressed and anxious, so Natsu supposed that he really shouldn't have been surprised when one day something finally snapped.


	18. Ch 17-Erza cries

**Chapter 17**

_(In which Erza cries and Gray plays the name game.)_

* * *

Natsu should have known better, because he knew from the moment he saw Gray that morning that this was going to be a bad day. When Natsu had went to wake his friend up, Gray had been tossing and turning, his face scrunched up as he mumbled unintelligible words under his breath. Upon being awoken, Gray stayed quiet and terse, and didn't want to talk about it. The ice mage was less than responsive through breakfast and the walk to the guild, not interested in joining the conversation Natsu and Happy were trying to promote. It made Natsu especially thankful for Happy's presence, because at least he had someone to talk to in order to avoid the awkward silence or even more awkward one-sided conversation that would normally be the result of Gray's withdrawal.

It was as they were walking into the guild that Happy mentioned a problem that Natsu had been vaguely aware of but had been ignoring for as long as possible.

"Natsu," the little cat said, "we're going to have to start taking jobs again. Our savings are pretty much gone now."

The dragon slayer grimaced but nodded. There hadn't been much time for going out on jobs. In fact, Natsu hadn't taken more than a handful of jobs ever since he had rescued Gray from the void and taken over his care, and the money had to run out eventually. They had burned through their nest egg pretty quickly because not only were they not working, but they were also providing food for all the guests who had been staying in their house. And Sting had eaten nearly as much as Natsu.

But that didn't mean that Natsu was excited about this new chore. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy the jobs— he was always up for the excitement of missions—but he was reluctant to leave Gray alone. Not that Gray would be  _alone-_ alone, considering that the rest of the guild would be looking out for him, but Natsu needed to be there himself. It wasn't that he didn't trust the others, but a small part of him was still worried that Gray might disappear again if left alone too long. Plus, Natsu felt responsible for Gray's care and he  _wanted_ to be responsible for it, which also made him unwilling to leave.

"Why don't you take a couple of jobs around town today?" Erza suggested. "I've got a couple errands to run, but I'll go walking with Gray in an hour or so. While I'm gone the rest of the guild can watch him, and then I'll keep an eye on him when I get back."

"I guess…" Natsu muttered reluctantly.

"We're very capable of looking after him for a few hours without you," Erza chided, rolling her eyes. "Besides, you've been stressed out lately because you're always watching him and never getting out and about anymore. Take Happy and do a couple of quick jobs. We can handle things until you get back. Believe it or not, you're not the only one who can make sure that he's doing alright."

Natsu bit his lip, still unsure that this was a good idea. But at the same time, they  _really_ needed to go earn some jewels. If they just took a couple of simple jobs around town—the so-called 'baby' jobs that he usually turned his nose up at—then they could be done in a few hours and have a little bit of money to work with until they could go out again. A few hours wasn't too bad. Of course, this plan would mean that Natsu and Happy would have to continue taking baby jobs every couple weeks to keep up a supply of funds. Natsu wasn't sure if he liked that, but he had to admit that getting a break for a couple hours would help relieve some stress, and it was still better than having to go on long, out-of-town jobs. He briefly wondered when he'd gotten so paranoid and overprotective that it bothered him to leave Gray's side for more than an hour, even knowing that the rest of the guild would still be there.

"Alright," Natsu agreed reluctantly, looking over at Gray for any sign that his friend might object. Gray just stared back flatly. Natsu grimaced slightly and looked away again, his eye catching on Lucy. "Hey, Lucy! Wanna do some jobs with me and Happy? It's not gonna get you a whole lot of rent money, but it's better than nothing."

The celestial spirit mage had been watching his exchange with Erza closely, and looked like she wanted to jump in and say something. At his words, her face lit up. Natsu supposed that she must miss going on team jobs. It had been a long time since they'd done one of those.

"Sure!" she said happily, bouncing slightly in excitement as she headed for the request board. "Let's pick some out!"

Natsu smiled at her enthusiasm. Casting one more backwards look at Gray, he followed after her, Happy flying along beside him. The trio bickered good-naturedly over what jobs they should take, and eventually decided on three that were in town and shouldn't take very long to complete.

They headed out of the guild, but Natsu paused in the doorway and looked back. Lyon and Juvia were clustered around Gray, trying to get him involved in conversation, and Wendy and a few others had drifted over as well. It looked like Gray would be well taken care of. And yet, Natsu still didn't like it. He'd make sure they got these jobs done as quickly as possible so that he could get back here soon.

He turned and followed the other two down the street, but hesitated for a fraction of a second before they rounded the first corner. Maybe he should have warned the others that Gray was having one of his bad days. Then he shrugged and discarded the thought. They would figure it out soon enough, and it wasn't like anything really bad could happen in only a couple hours.

* * *

Natsu had to admit that despite his reservations, the jobs had provided a much-needed respite. Being with Lucy and Happy away from the guild was relaxing and fun, and he realized that he had really missed their time together. It was nice to laugh and see Lucy happy again.

And yet, every once in a while, between their teasing jokes and laughter, Natsu would find himself frowning into space, missing the other teammate who should have been there but wasn't. Erza wasn't there either, but Natsu knew that she was just a few streets away at the guild. Technically Gray was too, but in reality the ice mage was lightyears away.

Aside from that, Natsu still got nervous being away from Gray too long and he was already getting antsy by the time they were on their last job of the day. He rushed through it as quickly as possible, and then the group headed back for the guild. Natsu counted up all the jewels with a small smirk, pleased that they could now support themselves for another couple weeks or so.

"Here's your share," he told Lucy cheerfully, handing her a small bag.

"Keep it, Natsu," Lucy said, not making any move to take it. "You aren't taking enough jobs as it is. You should save up what you can."

"But rent money!" Natsu protested, not liking the feeling that this was some kind of pity aid or charity.

"As if that's going to put a dent in my rent," Lucy said with a laugh. "I came with you today because I wanted to spend some time with you, not because I thought I was going to be able to pay off my rent."

"You're still gonna have to pay your rent at some point," Natsu pointed out reasonably. "Might as well take what you can get."

Lucy shrugged and looked away. "I've been going on some jobs with Wendy and Charle since you guys have been occupied, and I've gone out with Erza once or twice. We do some out-of-town jobs too, so I have enough for my rent already."

Natsu pursed his lips, not entirely liking the sound of that. Wendy and Charle were great and he counted them as fine friends, but Lucy belonged with him and the rest of the team for most jobs. Except that there really hadn't been a team lately, with Gray being an amnesic wreck, Natsu totally devoted to caring for him, and Erza busy trying to hold the guild together. It still stung a little that the team had drifted apart so much with their conflicting duties, but it couldn't be helped at this point. He resolved to try including Lucy and Erza in more of his activities with Gray and Happy, because he missed them and he thought it would do them all some good to spend some more time together.

"Just keep the jewels," Happy advised Natsu. "Think of how many more fish we could get!"

Natsu stared at him for a moment before laughing. "You have a one-track mind," he told the Exceed fondly.

"So do you," Happy shot back, which Natsu had to admit was true.

Lucy laughed. "I've missed you guys," she remarked, her eyes sparkling with amusement as she watched them. "Next time you decide you need to get some more jewels…"

"We'll invite you," Natsu assured her.

They pushed their way into the guild hall, and Natsu immediately sobered. There was a definite air of tension hanging over the assembled mages and the dragon slayer looked around hurriedly to detect the underlying cause, worried that something had happened to Gray. But no, there was the ice mage sitting at a table across from Erza. Gray still had that dead, dispassionate look on his face, but Erza's expression was pained, a mixture of sadness and disbelieving anger as she stared at him. Several other guild members were gathered around the pair uncertainly, looking like they wanted to intervene but were unsure of how to best go about it.

"It's been weeks," Erza was saying. "Are you really trying to say that you still don't care at all?"

"Erza-san," Wendy interrupted hesitantly. "Maybe it would be better to leave Gray-san alone for a while?"

Erza didn't even look at the younger girl. Her steely gaze remained fixed on Gray, who stared back flatly.

"Of course I don't," he said dispassionately. "Why should I?"

Erza recoiled as if struck and there was a collective intake of breath from the gathered mages, many of their expressions turning pained at Gray's pronouncement. Natsu didn't know what exactly was going on, but he thought that it was probably a good idea to put an end to it  _right now_. Luckily, he wasn't the only one with that idea.

"Erza-san, I really think it would be best not to have this conversation now," Wendy pressed, her gaze darting nervously between the requip mage and Gray.

Erza stood up abruptly. "You're right," she said brusquely. She walked across the hall with clipped strides to grab a drink from the bar and sit at an empty table away from everyone else.

Natsu blinked over at her and then looked back at Gray and the others. "What's going on here?" he asked.

A few people exchanged uncertain glances.

"All I know is that when Gray and Erza came back from their walk, they were arguing," Lyon offered. "Well, it was mostly Erza arguing with Gray because he hasn't been very talkative today. I don't know what set her off originally since I wasn't there, but something he said or did must have upset her and it just went downhill from there."

"Erza-san was questioning Gray-san when they came back in," Wendy added in a small voice. "But all of Gray-san's progress seems to have vanished, and he's acting like he did when he first came back from the void." She looked away. "Gray-san said that he doesn't care about any of us and doesn't have any reason too."

Natsu let out a breath, the previous exchange he had overheard between Gray and Erza suddenly starting to make sense. He frowned over at the ice mage. He didn't know how much of that was true. It was still really hard to tell what Gray did and didn't care about, and his memories and emotions were an unsolvable puzzle. Natsu liked to think that Gray was at least starting to care, so maybe this declaration just stemmed from the fact that he was having one of those days.

"Well hell, I knew I shouldn't have left," Natsu said with a sigh. "He's having one of his bad days. I'm sure you've noticed how he's been having ups and downs lately, and today didn't start off well. Whatever he's been saying…part of it could just be because of that."

"Maybe, but how could we even tell?" Lucy asked sadly. "It's so hard trying to figure out what he's actually thinking and feeling, and he won't tell us. I'm not sure that I really understand him at all anymore."

Natsu stared at her wordlessly for a moment, not wanting to admit that he was worried about the same thing. But on Gray's good days, Natsu was almost certain that he cared and knew more than he let on. Maybe he was impossible to read on his bad days, but Natsu didn't want to believe that all the progress he'd seen was a lie.

"He's been doing better in general, despite the mood swings," the dragon slayer said finally. "Sometimes he's almost like himself again. That can't all be some kind of fluke. It can't."

A charged silence fell over the gathered mages, and several sets of eyes turned automatically to Gray. The ice mage was staring blankly at the tabletop without acknowledging anyone. Natsu wished he'd say something, do something, to let them know that the old Gray was still in there somewhere.

"I think you're right," Lyon said in a subdued voice. "Or I hope so, anyway."

Gray didn't seem to care what they thought one way or the other, and was singularly disinterested in the pronouncement. Natsu didn't want to push him too much when he was like this, but something was going to have to change. If nothing else, it was time that they started figuring out what exactly was going on in Gray's head so that they knew how to set about fixing the problem.

Sighing, Natsu sat down across from Gray and leaned forward to study his friend's face. Although the ice mage was displaying his normal signs of apathy and withdrawal, he was also holding himself stiffly and a subtle air of tension lay over him. Natsu wasn't sure if the others had noticed, but something was definitely bothering Gray and he appeared to be more stressed out than usual. Maybe something Erza had said or done had caused it, maybe it was something else entirely. Natsu wanted to know, because they needed to know how to best help Gray and also because everyone else was getting hurt as well, as they walked around on eggshells and lived in fear of setting off their friend.

"Gray," Natsu said quietly, "what did you say to Erza?"

Gray shrugged and continued his disinterested study of the table, but his shoulders hunched slightly.

"What did you say to upset Erza?" Natsu pressed.

"I don't know," Gray muttered finally, shrugging again. "A lot of things, probably."

Natsu let out a breath. "Why?"

"I don't know," the ice mage mumbled again, his eyes narrowing. "Probably because she wants me to be someone I'm not."

"Who does she want you to be?"

Natsu studied Gray intently and beside him, he could feel everyone else also radiating tension as they waited for the ice mage's answer.

"I don't know. The same person you all want me to be, I suppose."

"And who is that?" Lucy asked, frowning at Gray.

Gray just shrugged again, but although Natsu was wary of pushing him too much right now, the dragon slayer also thought that this was something important enough to take a little risk for. If this was what was bothering Gray, then hearing his view on it and actually having him tell them what was going on could help them figure out what they were doing wrong.

"Gray—" Natsu started when his friend made no move to reply.

"Exactly," Gray interrupted, finally looking up to meet Natsu's gaze. Something dark flickered in his eyes for a moment.

"What do you mean?" Lyon broke in.

Gray scowled, and some of his apathy fell away to reveal something almost angry buried underneath. Natsu wasn't sure if Gray was actually angry at them or at something else entirely or perhaps was feeling something completely different, but this was the closest thing to anger that the dragon slayer had seen in Gray since he'd done his time in the void.

"I don't know you," Gray said harshly. His hands clenched reflexively into fists, his fingernails biting into his palms. "And you don't know me. Maybe you knew me before, if such a thing ever existed, but you don't know me now. Hell,  _I_ don't know me. How could you?"

"But we've been together for weeks now—" Natsu tried.

"It's not enough," Gray broke in, his eyes flashing. "You say that you want to understand me, but you don't, not really. What I am scares you. You don't really want to know. The only reason you want to understand me is because you want to find a way to 'fix' me, a way to turn me into—to turn me into  _him_. You don't want to know me for  _me_ , you don't want to shove memories down my throat for  _me_. You're doing it all to try to get  _him_ back.

"And that's fine." Gray pursed his lips, his gaze turning inward. "He was obviously important to you, I can see that. I don't really care about that part. But you're so busy trying to turn me into him that I can't figure out what the hell is going on here."

Natsu sucked in a breath and stared at Gray with wide eyes. This was the most Gray had spoken at one time, the most emotion he had ever displayed in one of his regressive states, the most he had ever told them about he felt. And it was rather horrifying, to be honest.

Natsu hadn't realized that the problem ran this deep, and certainly hadn't suspected that Gray might feel like that. The dissociation wasn't entirely unexpected since Gray had made it clear that he didn't identify with who he had been before, but as for the rest…Maybe they should have guessed that it would become an issue eventually, but Natsu hadn't realized that Gray cared enough about it to be bothered. They had never meant for him to feel that way.

"Gray, we never meant—"

Gray waved a hand dismissively. "I don't care," he said flatly. "Not about that. But I also don't have to care about you, because I don't know you and you mean nothing to me. I don't have to care about fixing my memory. I don't have to care about becoming him again. I don't care. And I don't want—I don't want—"

He broke off, making a frustrated sound in the back of his throat as he shook his head fitfully as if trying to clear it or get rid of a thought.

"What don't you want, Gray?" Natsu asked, his voice wavering slightly.

"I don't know!" Gray wailed, his voice rising in pitch and volume. He shrank back as if afraid or upset, but that piece of body language was at odds with the anger that colored his words when he next spoke and the scowl that spread over his face. "How am I supposed to know? Nothing makes sense here. It's all so  _loud_  and everything is so  _different_  and I wouldn't be having this problem if I was still in the void where I belonged. At least things made sense there, as much as things can make sense when there's nothing to make sense of.

"But now…" He shuddered and curled into himself as he babbled on. "Now I'm supposed to care about things, to feel things, to remember things, and it's too much. It's too much. 'Don't drift,' you say. 'Don't shut down on me,' you say. So what can I do then, when things get too loud?

" _You're_ pushing me and  _he's_ pushing me and  _it's_ pushing me, and you're all pulling me in different directions and you want different things and it's tearing me apart and I can't piece it all back together again. I can't do it all at once. You push so  _hard_. It's already hard enough without you always trying to make me remember or feel or care."

Natsu recoiled, his eyes growing wider and wider with every word. He wanted to ask who 'he' and 'it' were because something in Gray's inflection and tone made it clear that the words had some greater meaning and importance to him, but the dragon slayer couldn't seem to make his mouth work and no one else seemed any better off. And in any case, his question seemed insignificant in comparison to the magnitude of everything else Gray had said, and Natsu quickly forgot about it as he really took in Gray's state. The ice mage had wrapped his arms around himself tightly and his whole body was trembling. It worried Natsu, and Gray's well-being was more important than any other queries right now.

Natsu leaned forward and reached out to his friend almost automatically, concern temporarily eclipsing the aching of his heart.

"Gray, are you—?"

"Don't touch me!" Gray hissed, throwing himself backward and tripping over the bench in his haste to escape. He went crashing to the ground and half the guild was on their feet before their minds even registered what was happening. A strange mixture of panic and anger flared in Gray's eyes and he scooted backwards away from them, not even bothering to stand up in his hurry to put more space between himself and the others. He bared his teeth in a snarl, suddenly looking an awful lot like a cornered animal.

Everyone froze, unsure of what to do. Natsu had never seen Gray like this before and he didn't know how to make things better. He was afraid that one wrong move right now would send Gray over the edge. Natsu didn't know what would happen if Gray snapped completely, but he was terrified of whatever it might be.

Gray paused for a moment and tilted his head as if listening to something, his eyes glazing over. Then he seemed to snap out of it and began tossing his head fitfully again, clamping his hands over his ears and screwing his eyes shut.

"It's so  _loud_ today," he whimpered, shrinking into himself as much as possible while still sitting on the ground and shaking his head. "Make it stop. Leave me alone. Make it  _stop_."

Natsu didn't know what to do. He felt terrible and some of the things Gray had said  _hurt_ , but he could worry about that later, because right now he needed to figure out a way to get Gray to calm down before any more damage was done. He looked over at the others desperately, but no one else had any ideas either. More than one person was in tears, and almost everyone had some kind of horror-stricken look on their face. Lyon sensed Natsu's gaze and looked over, his eyes anguished and brimming with unshed tears.

"What do we do?" the older mage asked, his voice wavering and breaking. "What do we do?"

Natsu shook his head helplessly. "I don't know."

He looked back at Gray, who by now seemed completely oblivious to their presence as he rocked back and forth and stared blankly at the ground with unblinking eyes. Natsu didn't want to risk approaching Gray when he'd made it clear that he didn't want that, but he also couldn't just ignore the problem.

"Gray?" the dragon slayer asked gently. "We want to help you. If we've been doing the wrong thing then tell us how to make it right. Is there something we can do for you right now?"

He wasn't sure whether or not he should really expect an answer, but Gray slowly looked up and met his eyes.

"Talk," Gray said after a long pause, his strange anger apparently gone, vanished as if it had never been there at all. "To each other. About anything. But not about me, not to me, not including or related to me in any way at all."

Natsu stared at him in confusion for a moment. "You mean, like that night when you woke up and we walked around the city?"

"Exactly like that," Gray confirmed, hugging his knees to his chest.

"What does he mean?" Lyon asked uncertainly.

Natsu frowned thoughtfully, wondering if there was some kind of connection between both times Gray had asked him to just talk. There must be. Last time Gray had said that he 'needed' it, so it must be important. And it would have to be even more important this time, with Gray breaking down and clearly needing  _something_ to help him pull himself back together again. Natsu had to give him that. It was the only thing Gray had hinted might help, and it wasn't like Natsu had any better ideas.

"He just wants white noise," Natsu told Lyon distractedly. "He probably won't pay attention to what we're saying, but he still needs the sound for some reason. Maybe to help him calm down." He let out a shuddering breath. "So, I tell you what we're going to do. We're going to sit here and talk about something that has nothing to do with Gray, and hope that he calms down soon."

Everyone was still too shocked and shaken up to really question Natsu, so they tried to do as he instructed. They tried, but the conversation was stilted and distracted and subdued because no one could just put Gray's meltdown out of their mind, and they were too upset and stunned to be able to really focus on talking about such inane things. It felt weird to be trying to act like nothing had just happened, and everyone kept sneaking glances at Gray.

The longer the overly artificial conversation dragged on, the more Gray seemed to relax. He still wasn't looking at them, but his trembling eventually stopped and the unusual emotions were fading from his eyes. After about ten minutes he started watching them again, and after that he began slowly inching towards them, although he looked as if he might bolt at any sudden movement. Everyone held their breath and the conversation became more strained as they tried to keep an eye on Gray while pretending like they weren't. Eventually Gray hesitantly sat back down at the table in the spot he'd been sitting at before, everything about his demeanor screaming uncertainty and wariness as he eyed them cautiously.

The conversation faltered for a moment and Gray immediately frowned. Natsu recognized that sign from their nighttime stroll and hurriedly started rambling about the jobs he had done with Lucy and Happy earlier that day. Gray seemed to calm down a little and the longer he sat there, the more tension drained out of him. He had fixed his gaze on the table again and, slowly but surely, all his emotion seemed to drain away until he was left looking as apathetic and uninterested as he had earlier that morning. Natsu wasn't sure if Gray had really lost all that emotion again or if he was just hiding it, but he was too afraid to address his friend when Gray had specifically asked him not to. To be honest, Natsu's suspicion was that Gray was deliberately and purposefully trying to stamp out the unwanted emotions a little at a time until they had retreated enough to be bearable again.

"Hey, where did Erza go?" Mira asked suddenly, interrupting Natsu's story.

Natsu and the others automatically looked back towards the table where the requip mage had been sitting earlier, but she was nowhere to be seen. They had all been so distracted with Gray's outburst and the subsequent attempt to calm him down that they hadn't even noticed her leave. She must've slipped out the back door at some point when they weren't paying attention. Natsu couldn't imagine that she would have left before Gray had finished rambling, but she might have escaped once she'd realized that he was calming down again. She could have been gone for quite a while by now.

"Erza's a big girl," Gajeel answered, unconcerned. "She can take care of herself."

"Yes, but she was very upset," Wendy pointed out, tactfully not mentioning that they were  _all_ upset at this point. But it was also true that Erza might be unhappier than the rest of them right now because of whatever had happened on her walk with Gray, and perhaps because she was worried that she had a hand in setting Gray off.

"And if she wanted to be around us then she would've stayed," Gajeel shot back. "Leave her alone."

Wendy opened her mouth to respond, but everyone was distracted when Gray stood up suddenly. The ice mage's cold eyes were fixed on Gajeel, and everyone held their breath as they prayed that they hadn't managed to somehow screw things up again. For a moment Natsu thought that Gray was going to say something, but he just turned on his heel abruptly and stalked out of the guild hall.

"What's he doing?" Lucy asked, staring after Gray worriedly.

"I don't know, but he's not exactly stable right now," Mira cautioned, her lips turning downward into a pained frown. "It might not be a good idea for him to be running around on his own, even if he does know his way around the city now."

Natsu pushed himself to his feet as well.

"I'll go get him," he said, his eyes fixed on the doors that had just slammed shut behind his departing friend. "While I'm gone…I know that the things he said were pretty…terrible…and they hurt and we're all shaken up, but try to collect yourselves, alright? There are some things we're going to have to work out later, but I don't think he would have said most of this if he hadn't reached a breaking point. I don't think he really meant to hurt us, and things are going to be a lot more difficult to take care of if we're all wound up. Just…try to calm down before we get back, because you being all emotional might make it harder for him too."

He swallowed hard, knowing that would be easier said than done for himself as well as for the others, but tried to tamp down his grief and hurt and worry to be dealt with at a later time, when he was alone and Gray didn't need him. Everyone murmured in subdued agreement, so he started for the entrance, only pausing for a moment when Lyon spoke behind him.

"Take care of him," the older ice mage said quietly, his voice trembling slightly.

Natsu glanced back. "Always," he replied, fierce determination sparking in his eyes to crowd out his sadness and hurt.

Lyon met his eyes and inclined his head slightly. Natsu nodded sharply in return, before turning away and slipping out the doors.

Hurrying down the street after his friend, he soon caught up to Gray. The younger ice mage was walking quickly and purposefully, his eyes unreadable but slightly narrowed in something like determination. It puzzled Natsu since Gray rarely showed any kind of purpose or commitment when he was in his void-like state. Aside from that, Gray was acting like he usually did when he was a little withdrawn but not completely shut down. It was a little disconcerting, if only because he was giving absolutely no sign of his earlier outburst. It was as if it hadn't happened at all.

"Where are you going?" the dragon slayer asked as he fell into step beside his friend. He couldn't afford to slow his pace too much though, because Gray seemed to be in something of a hurry.

"I don't exactly know," the ice mage replied absently, not looking at Natsu. His eyes scanned the street ahead of them as if he was looking for something.

"What are you doing then?" Natsu pressed cautiously, afraid of sending Gray into another tailspin but curious about what was going on here.

Gray's flat expression didn't change. "I'm not completely sure."

Natsu grimaced. How was he supposed to work with this?

"Then  _why_ are you doing…whatever it is you're doing?" he asked, trying a slightly different approach without really expecting different results.

"How should I know?" Gray asked back, a hint of bitterness creeping into his otherwise expressionless voice. "How should I know anything? It's just a…feeling, maybe. I have to do something."

Natsu felt a slight prickle of hope. If Gray thought that he was feeling something, even if he didn't quite know what it was, then that could be a good sign. Unless it made him freak out again.

"Well then, what—?"

"You talk too much," Gray interrupted flatly.

Natsu blinked at him, taken aback, before letting out a surprised laugh that he quickly cut off. He was still worried and upset and it felt wrong to laugh.

"So I've been told," he answered. "Although I thought you liked the talking?"

"Sometimes, but you keep asking questions that I don't have answers for," Gray said shortly, his dark eyes darting about the street before finally fixing steadily on a point ahead of them. He still didn't look at Natsu. "Just stop, for now. Wait."

Natsu bit his lip and nodded. "Okay."

He followed his friend's lead in silence as Gray wound his way through the streets without hesitation. Although he supposedly didn't know where he was going, he seemed to have a pretty good idea of how to get there. His flat expression didn't change, but as he broke free from the dense cluster of buildings that made up the heart of the city, he sped up even more, eating up the ground in long, confident strides.

Natsu glanced around as they left the buildings behind, starting to get an idea of where they were going. He opened his mouth to voice his suspicion, but stopped himself. Gray wasn't paying much attention to him anyway, and the ice mage had made it clear that he didn't want to be asked any questions right now. Natsu doubted that he would get any real answers, no matter what he asked, and he wasn't going to risk upsetting Gray over something so trivial.

So he just followed Gray silently down the dirt pathway set off a little ways from Magnolia's main buildings. Grass stretched to either side of the path and the river soon appeared, winding lazily alongside a short distance away. Natsu was dying to ask Gray what he remembered of this place since it had been an important place during their childhood—many of their fights had taken place here when they were younger—but he didn't dare speak and certainly wasn't going to say anything about memories right now.

He did, however, let out an undignified squeak of surprise when they turned a corner and Erza came into view, sitting in the grass by the river. She wasn't facing them, but her scarlet hair was unmistakable.

"Gray?" he asked. "What—?"

The ice mage ignored him. Gray stepped off the path and headed directly for Erza's still form, his pace somehow managing to increase even more. Natsu followed, anxious as to how the coming confrontation would play out. Gray had already upset Erza enough, and he worried that one of them would misstep and do even more damage to the already delicate situation. But then again, Gray had also sought her out. Maybe. Natsu wasn't sure what to make of it all.

Erza was lost in her own thoughts and didn't respond to the soft crunching of grass underfoot, only looking up when Gray crouched down abruptly by her side. She jerked back, her eyes wide and startled. Her cheeks were stained with glistening tear tracks and Natsu winced, pausing where he stood several feet away to give the other two some space.

"Gray?" Erza asked, her voice wavering. "What are you doing here?"

Gray stared at her intently, studying her face for a moment and then meeting her eyes. Reaching out with one pale hand, he brushed away some of her tears.

"Don't cry," he said seriously, his voice low. Erza gasped audibly, and even Natsu blinked in surprise. "I didn't mean to make you cry."

The requip mage's eyes filled with fresh tears. "How did you…?"

She trailed off as her breath caught in her throat and she blinked rapidly to fight back more tears. Something flashed in Gray's eyes, something that Natsu would probably label as a mixture of sadness and regret if he could be sure that Gray was feeling anything at all.

"Please don't cry, Erza."

Both Erza and Natsu sucked in breaths in unison. The requip mage heard Natsu this time and glanced over at the dragon slayer. They met each other's eyes, and Natsu knew that she realized the significance of Gray's statement. This was the first time that Gray had used anyone's name since he had come back from the void. He had never addressed anyone by name and had made it quite clear that he found names rather useless and uninteresting, and yet he had just called Erza by her name.

"You do know my name then?" Erza asked, glancing back at Gray.

He bit his lip and looked away, his eyes narrowing slightly as his gaze wandered off to the side.

"…Yes."

"And you don't find it pointless?"

Gray sighed heavily, his gaze turning inward. "If it matters to you that much then I can try to use your name."

It wasn't exactly an answer, but it was something. Erza leaned forward, peering intently at Gray's face as she clasped his hands tightly in hers. He tensed slightly but didn't pull away.

"Then you do care?" she asked hesitantly, her voice edged in raw grief and desperate hope.

Gray looked down at their joined hands and then up at Erza's face. He didn't respond immediately, and when he finally did, he sounded a touch uncertain.

"I don't know," he said slowly. "Maybe sometimes? I think I do sometimes, but it's too hard to understand. I…don't know."

For a second Erza looked a little relieved that he hadn't flat out denied it, but then her eyes dimmed again as she considered his discouraging answer. Gray noticed the sadness veiling her face and grimaced slightly.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, a hint of wistful regret touching his voice.

Erza tried to smile, although it didn't come out quite right. Meanwhile, Natsu walked over, studying Gray carefully. He stopped next to his two friends and stared down at Gray, his arms crossed over his chest.

"Are you?" the dragon slayer asked the ice mage. "Are you really?"

Gray should know better than to apologize lightly by now. Natsu had told him not to apologize unless he truly meant it. The ice mage had agreed and hadn't apologized ever since that time Natsu had chewed him out for drifting after the mess with Gemini. That had been many weeks ago, and Natsu had thought that the matter was closed. If Gray was going to start up the insincere apologies again then this was a bad time to do it, because Natsu wasn't sure that he should be getting Erza's hopes up.

Still, the dragon slayer immediately regretted his blunt question because he thought that maybe that wasn't the best way to go about things when the ice mage had just broken down, but Gray just frowned thoughtfully as he considered the question. Then his face cleared and looked back up at Natsu.

"Yes…" the ice mage answered slowly, a mixture of faint astonishment and wonder coloring his voice. "I think I am."

Natsu's eyes widened in surprise at the unexpected reply, and for a moment his throat felt tight and constricted. After all the things Gray had said in the guild hall…This was not what Natsu had been expecting to hear now. Erza let out a shaky breath and then a watery smile spread over her face. Gray just continued to look vaguely surprised and more than a little lost.

Natsu crouched down beside Gray so that he could look at his friend face-to-face. He peered at the ice mage solemnly.

"If you're actually sorry, if you even think that you're really sorry, then that means that you care after all," he told Gray quietly, his eyes burning with unshed tears.

Gray stared back at him, wide-eyed, and seemed to turn that assertion over in his head. He nodded slowly as he digested that, and Natsu hoped that it meant that he was finally starting to learn how to decipher and understand his own feelings.

"Maybe I do," Gray whispered, looking down at his hands as he wrung them together. "Sometimes I think I do. Sometimes I want to." He shrank into himself again. "I'm…I think I might be sorry for what I said before. I don't think I meant it. Not all of it, anyway. Some of it I did. I…I don't know. I try, but it's so much and…I don't know."

Natsu's heart twisted painfully, but a spark of hope flared up as well, because Gray seemed to be trying to take back some of what he had said. Natsu had suspected that some of those things had just stemmed from Gray being overwhelmed and upset, and so didn't necessarily reflect Gray's normal state of mind when he wasn't so worked up, but the confirmation was good.

"It's okay," Natsu said softly. "Or, it will be. Maybe we've just been pushing you too hard when we should have been giving you more time to take things in and adjust, and you snapped. We're sorry about that, because we don't want to hurt you.

"And…Maybe you were right. Maybe we haven't been doing things quite right because we've been so focused on getting you back to the way you were instead of paying more attention to who you are right now. Maybe you're right that we aren't sure we really want to understand you because it frightens us and we mostly make halfhearted attempts just to try to help us figure out how to fix your memories, but we'll try to do better. You're just as important for who you are now as for who you were then, and I'd…I'd like to know both sides of you."

"And I'm sorry that I kept bothering you about your memories on our walk," Erza added, glancing away. "I shouldn't have been so pushy. I didn't mean to upset you. But…maybe we can find a better way to do things? I'd still like to work with you and understand you better and help you, if you'll let me."

Gray looked between Natsu and Erza for a few seconds and nodded, offering them a hesitant smile that lingered uncertainly for a moment before fading away.

"I think…I think I'd like that." Then he let out his breath in a sigh and sobered. "But it's not your fault, not really," he said, his voice subdued as he frowned at the ground. "There are just a lot of things happening, and they aren't all you. It was just worse than usual today."

And there was that slight inflection on the word 'it' again. Natsu didn't understand it.

" _What_ was worse than usual today?" the dragon slayer asked slowly.

Gray looked up and his eyes were suddenly wary again. "Nothing. Everything."

Natsu backed off immediately. Maybe he'd get answers later, but no way was he going to push for them now.

"Thank you for coming to find me," Erza told Gray quietly. "But…How did you know I would be here? Did you remember something?"

Natsu cocked his head and frowned in mild confusion. "What would he have remembered?"

"Back when we were kids…Well, Gray and I didn't get along at first, to be honest," Erza explained, sighing softly. "He was always trying to fight me and it was pretty obvious that he didn't think much of me. Not that I really thought much of him either, to be honest. But then one day I was sitting right here and I was, um, crying, because everything that had happened with Jellal and the Tower of Heaven…Well, it was still fresh then."

She glanced back over at Gray contemplatively. "And he came down here looking for a fight, but when he saw that I was crying he ended up sitting here with me instead because he said that I shouldn't have to cry alone. After that he stopped picking fights with me as often and he was a lot less hostile. I think that's when we finally started becoming friends, actually.

"I still come down here sometimes when I need to think or be alone, and before…before everything with Memento Mori, he would come here looking for me sometimes. If he knew I was upset over something and he couldn't find me anywhere else, he'd look down here and sit with me. I don't even know how he knew I was down here half the time, but it was like he always seemed to know when I needed him."

Natsu considered that. Neither Erza nor Gray had ever told him this particular story before. It was kind of touching, and reminded him of how Gray had started unobtrusively looking after him around the anniversary of Igneel's disappearance each year, even though the ice mage hadn't been overly touchy-feely about it. No, this wasn't a story Natsu had heard before, but it didn't surprise him. Gray had always been that type of person.

It  _did_ , however, raise the question of whether or not  _Gray_ still knew this story, because he had come directly here after Erza had disappeared from the guild. Natsu felt a sudden flash of panic because they had just talked about the past in front of Gray after he'd just ranted about them trying to force him to remember things, but luckily Gray just shook his head slowly and didn't freak out.

"I don't remember," he said flatly, a hint of defensiveness clouding his face.

Natsu was disappointed, and judging by the look on Erza's face, she was too. But still, Gray hadn't completely shut down again, so that was a good thing at least.

"Did you maybe point this spot out to him on your walks?" Natsu suggested to Erza.

The requip mage shrugged and shook her head. "We've walked along the river before, but I never pointed out this particular spot and I certainly never told him this story."

"Well," Natsu said thoughtfully, "he might not have consciously remembered anything, but I think that he might have gotten some kind of unconscious impulse or something. When we realized you were gone, he just got up and walked out without saying anything. He came directly here without stopping. When I asked him where he was going he couldn't tell me, but he still got here without any trouble. Maybe something was starting to surface."

She looked hopeful again, but Gray was starting to look distinctly apprehensive and uncomfortable again. Natsu decided that it was time to stop pushing their luck.

"Why don't we head back to the guild?" he suggested. "Everyone was wondering where you went, and Lyon looked like he might strangle me if I didn't bring Gray back quickly."

Gray smiled faintly. Natsu wasn't completely sure why, but it was good to see nonetheless. Surprising too, given his mood.

"Alright," Erza replied, scrubbing at her face vigorously to remove any stray tear tracks. "Let's go."

The three mages headed back to the guild. Natsu wasn't sure if Gray still wanted the talking, but he started up a conversation with Erza just in case. The ice mage remained quiet, but it was more of a thoughtful atmosphere that was different from his earlier apathy and seemed a lot less negative than the mix of emotions he'd displayed earlier. It really was like Gray was in a completely different mood from when he'd had his breakdown, although Natsu wasn't sure how he could have shifted so quickly.

When they walked back into the guild hall, they were met with a sea of apprehensive, tear-stained faces. Luckily no one was in hysterics and they seemed to have taken Natsu's advice to try to calm themselves down in preparation for Gray's return.

"What happened?" Lyon asked anxiously, darting worried looks at Gray.

Natsu sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "He seems to be doing a little better now." He glanced over at Gray for confirmation, and the ice mage nodded and bowed his head to stare at the floor. "Just…Look, you know how he said that things were too 'loud'? That's what he said when he first came back from the void, when he was getting overwhelmed. Back then it was the color and noise and shock of seeing things that shouldn't have existed for him. Now it's the memories and the feelings, I think.

"We've noticed that he's been getting stressed out lately, but I think it's pretty clear at this point that he's been getting too overwhelmed. I think that for now we need to just take it slow and not press him too hard for a little while. We're going to need to be more careful about not pushing him too much, because he's having a hard time handling it all at once. Alright?"

"Okay," Lyon said quietly. Everyone else nodded as well. "We'll try."

Satisfied, Natsu opened his mouth to tell the others what had taken place at the riverbank, but he broke off when Gray unexpectedly spoke up.

"I'm sorry," Gray said, twisting his hands together and letting his hair fall into his face so that they couldn't see his expression. "It's not all you. It's…I don't know. I didn't mean…" He shook his head slightly. "I'm sorry."

There was a moment of stunned silence, broken only by someone sniffling loudly.

"We're sorry too," Lyon said finally, clearing his throat and averting his gaze. "We should have been more careful and paid more attention to how you were handling things."

"We'll do better," Lucy added, giving Gray a watery smile. "And if you start feeling overwhelmed, you can tell us and we'll stop pushing you."

Gray glanced up to look at her and tried to smile back, although it came off strained and faded away quickly. Natsu was surprised that he'd even tried at all. Maybe he really was doing better than earlier.

"Well, what happened was that Gray apparently knew where Erza was, somehow, and he went after her," the dragon slayer said briefly, deciding to get things back on track. He wasn't sure how much detail he should share since the experience had been rather private, but he could give them the basics. "And…he called Erza by her name."

For a moment no one moved, but then hesitant smiles began creeping across people's faces. They had all noticed Gray's reluctance to use names, so they realized how important this could be.

"So he does at least  _know_ some of our names then?" Lucy asked.

Natsu shrugged. "He knew Erza's, at least."

Everyone looked at Gray, who shifted uneasily but didn't look like he was about to start rambling again. Natsu opened his mouth but hesitated, not sure if he should actually press Gray right now. The ice mage seemed better than earlier, but that didn't mean that he might not shut down again at the slightest provocation.

Gray noticed the dragon slayer watching him and raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Just…How many of our names  _do_ you know?" Natsu asked cautiously.

Gray stared at him blankly and didn't respond immediately.

"Natsu," he said finally, speaking the name slowly as if he was testing it for the first time. The inflection was a little strange, but Natsu's heart jumped into his throat all the same. He swallowed hard, but before he could think of a way to respond, Gray had looked away. His eyes fixed on Lucy next.

"Lucy," he said. His gaze drifted onward. "Happy, Wendy, Charle, Romeo, Cana, Mira, Lisanna, Elfman, Gajeel, Pantherlily, Levy, Laxus, Freed, Bickslow, Evergreen, Alzack, Bisca…"

He looked at each guild member in turn and reeled off their name. The names sounded a little strange in his mouth, a little like he still didn't quite understand their purpose or how they should be used, but he  _knew_ them.

"Loke," he added, as the spirit materialized beside Lucy. Loke smiled faintly.

And then Gray paused, his eyes slowly traveling back and forth between Lyon and Juvia. They looked, frankly, terrified. Gray had said everyone else's name, but for a moment he didn't speak as he looked at the 'screamers'. Natsu felt a moment of apprehension as well, because he didn't think Lyon and Juvia would take it well if they were the only ones that Gray refused to acknowledge.

"Lyon," Gray said finally, his eyes lingering on his adoptive brother for several seconds before he turned his attention to the water mage. "Juvia."

There was a collective exhale as Gray finished naming everyone in the guild hall and fell silent.

"He knows them all," Lucy whispered in awe, staring at Gray with shining eyes as this newest triumph overshadowed the earlier grief.

For his part, Gray frowned and peered about the hall as if he was looking for something.

"One is missing," the ice mage said flatly, his lips quirked downwards in a puzzled grimace.

That caught everyone off guard.

"What do you mean?" Natsu asked, frowning in turn. He looked around as well, helplessly trying to figure out what was bothering his friend.

"Is someone out on a job or something?" Erza questioned, glancing around.

"Not right now," Mira replied. "Everyone is here."

"Then what…?"

They all stared at Gray in perplexed bafflement. The ice mage raked his eyes across the hall one more time before returning his gaze to Natsu.

"Where is Jii-chan?" he asked.

Natsu's eyes widened and everyone else was just as shocked. Makarov had been missing since before Gray had come back from the void. The other guild members might have mentioned him from time to time as they puzzled over where he might have ended up or discussed new leads they'd discovered on his possible location, but Gray had never shown any interest and he hadn't had any contact with the guild master since his memory had been erased. In other words, Gray should not be asking after Jii-chan. Gray should barely even be aware of Makarov's existence.

"What do you know about Jii-chan?" Natsu demanded automatically, before he could stop himself.

Gray frowned faintly in confusion. "I…don't know. Nothing."

"Well, you brought him up," Cana pointed out. "Surely you must know  _something_."

"He's not here," Gray responded, his voice brittle as he eyed the others warily. "That's all."

Sensing Gray's increasing discomfort, Natsu hurried to intercede before things spiraled out of control again.

"He went missing," Natsu told Gray. "Fairy Tail disbanded for a while before you came back, and he disappeared then. We've been keeping an ear out for any information on his whereabouts, but we haven't seen him since."

Something unreadable flashed in Gray's eyes. "Oh," he said.

Less concerned with this newest development than the others, or perhaps just paying it less attention because he appeared to be distracted by something else, Bickslow took a few steps forward as he scrutinized the ice mage. Gray's eyes immediately snapped to his face, and the two men stared at each other for a few seconds.

"It's weird," Bickslow muttered.

" _What's_  weird?" Lyon demanded, sudden fear spiking in his voice, probably exacerbated by the lingering remnants from their earlier scare.

The other mage shot Lyon an annoyed look, but kept talking. "I could've sworn…Well, his soul is definitely brighter than it was when he walked out of the hall earlier. I'm sure that it's stronger now than it was this morning."

Natsu squinted over at Gray excitedly, as if he could see any physical sign of Bickslow's assertion. Gray, of course, looked exactly the same to Natsu, but the dragon slayer couldn't help but be hopeful anyway.

"Maybe because he's starting to reconnect to pieces of his old life?" Lucy suggested. "Or because he's made some kind of breakthrough?"

"Perhaps," Bickslow said, still watching Gray with a faintly puzzled expression. "I just haven't seen anyone's soul fluctuate like this before. It's odd."

"It's  _good_ ," Lyon corrected, smiling over at Gray.

"Well yes, that too," Bickslow replied.

Gray bit his lip and turned away, drifting over to the table Lucy was standing by. Natsu and Erza followed, and settled themselves on the bench by him as he sat down. He took out that infernal notebook again and started scribbling in it frantically. Natsu tried to take a surreptitious peek, but Gray's arm was in just the right position to prevent him from seeing anything useful and the dragon slayer wasn't going to push his luck. With a disappointed sigh, he settled back.

"Is it just me, or does he write in there a lot now?" Lucy asked quietly, leaning in towards Natsu so that she could whisper in the dragon slayer's ear.

"He writes even more when he's at his apartment," Happy muttered back.

Natsu nodded. "He doesn't seem keen to share it with us either," he added in a low voice. "I'm dying of curiosity."

At that moment, Gray snapped the notebook shut and returned it to his jacket pocket. The others fell silent as his eyes swept over them, suddenly nervous again. Natsu couldn't tell whether or not he had heard them since his gaze was unreadable, but Gray only looked at them for a second before he focused on Erza.

"It's a nice day out," he told her conversationally.

Natsu felt his eyebrows shoot up. Erza, Lucy, and Happy looked no less flabbergasted. Gray rarely initiated any topic of conversation, especially when he had been having one of his bad days, and had been a complete mess earlier. And yet here he was, chatting with Erza about the weather.

"Um, yes," the requip mage agreed cautiously, not sure what Gray was getting at. The ice mage's gaze slid away.

"It would be a good time to visit the park, don't you think?" he asked her, his eyes slightly narrowed as they fixated on a point on the floor. "Would you like to come with me?" He hesitated and then his mouth twisted slightly. "Erza?" He said her name with no little trepidation and discomfort, but Natsu recognized the gesture for what it was.

Erza stared at him in surprise and then a smile spread over her face. "Of course, Gray."

She stood and Gray followed suit. Erza flashed an ecstatic grin at the others before she headed for the doors of the guild, Gray following on her heels.

"Wow, he seems to be in a much better mood now. Should we offer to go too?" Lucy asked as they watched them leave.

Natsu shook his head. "He didn't invite us, did he?"

"Too bad," Happy mumbled. "It might've been fun."

Natsu tore his gaze away from the spot Gray and Erza had disappeared, and looked over at Lucy and Happy. He smiled contentedly, the magnitude of Gray's gesture eclipsing the pain he had inflicted earlier.

"This is his way of apologizing to her," Natsu told them. "I don't know what exactly happened on their earlier walk, but it wasn't good. Now he's trying to make up for it. And I think that she'll probably try to make up for whatever part she played too."

Lucy considered that. "Has he done that before?"

Natsu frowned and thought back. There had been a few times when Gray had done similar things, but not in the context of apologies. The dragon slayer thought that must be progress, since Gray had shown no comprehension of heartfelt apologies before.

"Not exactly," he responded.

Natsu found himself smiling a little. Today had been rough and not everything was totally alright again yet, but…Natsu thought that tomorrow might be a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha ha, I know I said that Gray's reaction wouldn't be that severe here, but I changed my mind and made it a little more dramatic. I tried to smooth out some of the edges since I sandwiched the updated scene right in the middle of the chapter, but if the ending part (starting when Gray leaves the guild hall) seems a little too light or not quite right with how Gray snapped, that's why. Originally the mood wasn't nearly as dark, so the rest of the chapter reflected that. I wanted to try to make the emotional difference a little less jarring while still keeping as much of the original writing as possible.
> 
> And yes, if you didn't guess, this chapter is the real reason why I instituted the daily walks way back in the beginning. I mean, they served other useful purposes too, but this is the main reason I bothered with them. Because I set things up way too far in advance XD


	19. Ch 18-Natsu almost burns down the guild

* * *

**Chapter 18**

_(In which Natsu almost burns down the guild hall and Gray becomes independent.)_

* * *

The incident with Natsu pushing Gray too far while using Rufus and Meredy's magic—and the resulting understanding they came to after Gray hunted Natsu down—was a breakthrough point. It had seemed to break through some of Gray's void-apathy and had allowed him to begin remembering snippets of things and sometimes start acting almost like his old self again. It clearly hadn't been perfect, considering how Gray had fallen into a pattern of good and bad days shortly after and had started getting touchy about his almost-memories, but it had been a turning point.

The incident with Erza at the riverbank turned out to be another such breakthrough point. After Gray had invited Erza out on an apology excursion, he had made an effort to at least be polite to everyone else for the rest of the day. Natsu could tell that he was still stressed out at times, but the thought was there. Gray had been awkward and uncomfortable for the rest of that day despite his best efforts, shuffling around without being able to meet anyone's gaze. It was at odds with how mostly nice and cooperative he was being, and it puzzled Natsu at first until it occurred to him that Gray felt bad about his earlier outburst. He could still remember Gray asking if he made Lyon and Natsu unhappy, and figured that something similar might be at play here since everyone had certainly looked unhappy after everything Gray had said. Natsu did his best to discourage this idea and warn the others about it to prevent any misunderstandings. It seemed to work, because Gray was in a much better mood the next day.

Even better, in the days that followed, Gray began having fewer and fewer bad days, and even his worst days were pretty mild in comparison to what they had been before. It probably helped that everyone was making more of an effort to really understand him and his thought process and the variations in his moods. It was still hard not to compare everything about him to how he had been before the void and Natsu doubted that they'd ever truly be able to separate the two, but they at least tried to make sure that they were looking at him in light of who he was now instead of automatically viewing everything through the lens of how he used to be. Everyone started being more careful about how much and how hard they pushed him to remember things, and in return, Gray did his best to work with them without freaking out.

And he was actually trying to be nice to everyone too, perhaps in an attempt to make up for how upset he had made them when he told them that he didn't care about them. He even went so far as to occasionally eat lunch with Juvia and cooperate more fully with Lyon during their magic lessons. Not that Gray's magic had really improved much, but he at least seemed to be trying harder. Natsu had originally thought that Gray's renewed effort was the product of a sudden interest in magic, but in watching the two ice mages interact, he eventually came to the conclusion that Gray was trying harder not because he was suddenly interested, but because he was trying to be nicer to Lyon. In part, that was a disappointing revelation since Natsu had been hopeful that Gray was finally starting to remember how important his magic had been to him. On the other hand, it also highlighted the fact that Gray was now making real, voluntary efforts to try making his friends feel better, even the 'screamers'. Natsu couldn't say for sure, but he was also hoping that this was a sign that perhaps Gray was trying to understand the rest of them better too.

Gray was also a little more talkative than usual, and seemed to be in better spirits most of the time. He would still start withdrawing if anyone made too much fuss over his memories or past, but as long as the conversation didn't turn to topics he was uncomfortable with, he would join in animatedly. Sometimes he would still say things that he really shouldn't have known since his memory had been erased. Occasionally he would realize that he was saying something odd and stop, that puzzled frown easing over his face as he quietly withdrew from the conversation to think it over. Other times he wouldn't notice at all and would just keep right on talking. Natsu didn't even point out all of those incidents anymore. He found that it was better to let Gray just keep talking instead of making him uncomfortable.

As for the names…Well, Gray didn't use them often. They still seemed awkward in his mouth and he obviously didn't like using them, but he  _had_ called someone by name a few times in the couple weeks since the incident with Erza. Everyone took it as a sign of progress, that Gray was becoming more 'normal', and they got excited each and every time it happened. Natsu wasn't sure if they had actually picked up on the pattern yet. Gray still never used names in regular conversation. The only time he mentioned someone by name was if he had said something that had obviously disappointed or hurt them, or if they seemed sad or out of sorts for one reason or another. In other words, Gray was forcing himself to do something that made him uncomfortable but which cheered up the others, as a way of apologizing or trying to make someone feel better. That meant that Gray wasn't making so much progress in the area of reverting back to old— _human_ —habits in the sense of something as fundamental as distinguishing his friends by name, but it  _did_ mean that he was making a lot of progress in the area of interpersonal relationships. Natsu counted that as a good thing.

And since it was a good thing, the dragon slayer was itching to celebrate. Of course, his idea of celebration meant that he wanted to start a fight and rough someone up a little. His first choice would be Gray since the ice mage was his best friend and rival, but although Gray had been making great progress in the two weeks since the latest breakthrough, Natsu thought it might be a bad idea to try starting a brawl with him right now. Instead, he waited until Gray and Erza went out for their walk one morning, and then picked a fight with Gajeel.

Gray might be the easiest person for Natsu to rile up, but Gajeel could be a close second. It took only a couple taunting remarks to set the iron dragon slayer off this time. It might've just been that he had a temper and was easily irritated by Natsu's mocking, or maybe he was just stressed out and already stretched to his breaking point. In any case, it couldn't be too bad—Gajeel's initial fury quickly subsided into more of a friendly annoyance. Natsu was having a good time and, as far as he could tell, Gajeel was too.

It had been a long time since Fairy Tail had had one of its infamous knock-down, drag-out fights in its guild hall—it just hadn't felt right without Gray—and most everyone was eager to join in. The brawl soon escalated to include the entirety of the guild and, despite the thrown insults and flying fists, there were grins and sparkling eyes all around. Sure, there would be hell to pay when Erza came back and found the hall a mess, but for now everyone was enjoying the fun. Natsu thought that it made the guild feel like home again. The lack of brawling had been unnatural and strange.

"Get back here, Salamander!" Gajeel growled, lunging for Natsu.

Natsu just laughed and hopped backwards, up onto one of the tables. "Come and get me," he taunted.

He hurriedly jumped to the side as a steel pillar went slicing through the air right where he had just been standing. A booming crash reverberated through the hall as it smashed into the far wall. Natsu glanced back and winced when he saw the splintered mess there. So much for their brand new guild hall. Erza would be livid.

Taking full advantage of his foe's temporary distraction, Gajeel took the opportunity to strike again. Natsu grunted as another steel column—one that was, admittedly, smaller and had less bone-crushing potential—slammed painfully into him and sent him flying backwards.

"Ha! Take that!" Gajeel crowed victoriously.

Natsu sprang to his feet, rubbing briefly at his chest in an attempt to quell some of the pain radiating from there, and narrowed his eyes at the other dragon slayer.

"Ooh, you asked for it now," he replied, fire blazing to life in his fists as he grinned over at Gajeel with a mixture of competitive determination and an eagerness for destruction. The gloves were obviously coming off now. If Gajeel was going to fight dirty with his magic then Natsu would too.

He charged at Gajeel, flaming fists swinging, and the other dragon slayer hurriedly dodged around him. Natsu took another wild punch at his face, but it didn't connect. Instead, Gajeel's iron fist slammed into Natsu's stomach and sent him sprawling across the room again. For a moment, Natsu lay still in the wreckage of the table he had crashed into. Then he slowly stood up, his eyes blazing.

"You're losing your touch, Salamander," Gajeel jeered.

Natsu smirked wickedly. "Oh, am I now?" he asked.

Gajeel had the good sense to look a little apprehensive, but Natsu was already sucking in a lungful of air.

"Fire dragon's roar!"

Gajeel cursed and tried to defend himself with his iron, but Natsu's flames slammed into him and sent him flying. Natsu whooped in triumph, pumping his fist in the air.

"Ha! Beat that!"

Okay, so maybe a full-blown roar was a little overkill, but the conceited jerk was asking for it, and it felt damn good to wipe that smug look off his face.

"Natsu! What did you do?" Lucy cried.

Natsu looked over at her, to see that she was staring around the hall in horror. Following her gaze, he groaned and cursed. The roar really  _had_ been overkill. Aside from the number it had done on Gajeel, his flames had managed to catch half the guild on fire. The flames had first spread to some of the wrecked tables and benches. Finding kindling and an easy source of fuel, they quickly leaped wildly into the air and began spreading to any wood they could find, setting a good portion of the guild ablaze.

Erza was going to kill him.

"Oops," he said.

Lucy gave him a disbelieving look. " _Oops_?" she asked incredulously, a scowl spreading across her face. " _Oops_? That's what you have to say?"

"Sorry?"

She rolled her eyes and turned away. "Where's Juvia?" she asked, looking around frantically.

The guild was in chaos, but a different kind of chaos than before. Instead of fighting, everyone had started running around looking for a way to put out the flames. Mira had run to the tap to get water and was pouring it on some of the fire. It didn't do much good because it wasn't enough water to be effective. Cana dumped a barrel that undoubtedly contained liquid with an extraordinarily high alcohol content over a flaming table, with even worse results. The fire immediately roared to life and leapt higher in the air. Elfman hurriedly grabbed Cana and yanked her back so that she wasn't singed by the blaze.

"What are you thinking, putting alcohol on fire?" he asked her, shaking his head.

"Thanks for saving my eyebrows." Then she shrugged and looked vaguely repentant. "It's liquid and we don't have enough water."

"If we could just find  _Juvia_ …" Lisanna said, frazzled. "Has anyone seen her?"

"She wasn't in here when the fight started," Gajeel grunted. "Dunno where she went."

"What about Lyon?" Natsu asked, watching transfixed as his fire turned the guild into a raging inferno. He wasn't sure if Lyon's ice would actually be that useful against such a big conflagration, but it must surely be better than nothing.

"He's not here either!" Lucy called back.

"Well now would be a damn good time for one of them to show back up," Gajeel snapped.

"Maybe we should just evacuate?" Mira suggested. "It might burn itself out eventually."

"Only once it's taken out the whole guild," Cana muttered.

"And we just rebuilt it a few months ago too!" Lucy wailed.

Several people glared pointedly over at Natsu.

"Sorry?" he offered again, choosing not to point out that their new guild hall was actually coming up on its one-year anniversary in just a few months, which had to be a new record. He didn't really think that the others would appreciate him saying that though.

Gajeel opened his mouth, likely to say something unbelievably rude that Natsu undoubtedly deserved, but broke off abruptly when something in the atmosphere shifted. The air around them, overheated because of the blazing fire, suddenly became cold as a freezing blast roared through the guild. The flames literally froze, ice crystallizing them in a way that fire should not be able to crystallize. The crackling of the fire died away as each individual flame was coated in a jagged layer of ice, and the rest of the guild didn't fare much better. Ice spread across the floor and walls, covered the tables and benches, and gave the hall the look of a sparkling ice cave dripping with shimmering icicles and frozen flames.

Natsu's mouth dropped open and his eyes widened as he took in the impossible sight. He hadn't realized that Lyon was powerful enough to actually  _freeze_ his flames. That shouldn't even be possible. But still, Natsu owed the other mage for fixing his mess, so he turned around to thank Lyon.

But it wasn't Lyon standing in the doorway to the guild hall. Erza was standing there, a faintly horrified and disbelieving look on her face, but despite his concern that she was going to tear him apart for this, Natsu wasn't that interested in her at the moment. He was more focused on Gray, who was standing beside her. The ice mage's hands were still outstretched from casting his magic, but he slowly lowered them back to his sides and looked over at Natsu.

"What the hell were you thinking, flame brain?" Gray asked with a scowl and a hard look. "I leave for an hour and you decide that it's a good idea to try burning down the guild again?"

Natsu stared at him in stunned disbelief, and none of the others seemed any better off. After a long moment, Lucy finally spoke up.

"Did you  _see_ that?" she whispered in awe. "He's barely been able to make so much as an ice cube in his lessons with Lyon, but the amount of magic he just used…"

"I thought you couldn't use or control your magic," Cana told Gray bluntly.

The ice mage shifted uncomfortably and frowned. "I don't know. It just happened."

"But he used his magic!" Lucy exclaimed happily, her eyes shining with excitement. "This is great!"

Natsu was also terribly impressed by Gray's display—it really was a staggering feat under the best of circumstances, and should be impossible considering that Gray had shown little interest in his magic up to this point and had made almost zero progress in actually producing ice—but it was something else that had caught his attention.

"He called me 'flame brain'!" he burst out.

Everyone's heads swiveled to look at him.

"That's what you're excited about?" Lucy asked. "He just pulled off this phenomenal magical stunt, the first real magic he's performed since the void, and you're excited because he insulted you?"

"It's 'cause he's an idiot," Gajeel muttered.

Natsu ignored the other dragon slayer. He was too excited to be bothered with Gajeel's grumpiness.

"It's been a long time since he's called me that," Natsu said, grinning over at Gray. Gray watched him uncertainly for a moment and then smiled back hesitantly. Natsu's grin widened even further.

"Only you would be so happy about insulting nicknames," Lucy said, but her tone was fond and Natsu thought that maybe she understood.

"As awesome and fantastic as this stunt was, can you get rid of all this ice now, Gray?" Cana asked brusquely, rubbing her bare arms vigorously. "It's damn cold in here."

"Then maybe you should put more clothes on," Laxus grumbled unsympathetically.

She scowled over at him. "Well, it  _was_ burning hot until just a minute ago," she snapped back.

"Cana makes a good point," Mira interjected, hurriedly cutting off the brewing argument. She smiled back over at Gray. "Can you melt your ice?"

Gray blinked at her and then looked around the room. His eyes traveled slowly over the gleaming ice and jagged crystals covering every surface. Then he frowned slightly and looked back at them.

"No?"

"What do you mean, 'no'?" Erza asked suspiciously.

He shrugged helplessly. "I don't even know how I made the ice in the first place, much less how to get rid of it."

There was a brief pause. Then Cana groaned.

"You have  _got_ to be kidding me," she grumbled.

"What the  _hell_ happened here?" came a new voice.

Gray and Erza glanced behind them and stepped to the side, to reveal Lyon and Juvia standing in the entrance. The two newcomers edged into the hall, looking around at the ice cavern in wonder.

"You did this?" Lyon asked, glancing over at Gray.

Gray shrugged. "Apparently."

"Gray-sama used his magic!" Juvia exclaimed excitedly.

"Yeah, yeah, been there already," Cana broke in impatiently, still rubbing her arms even as her whole body shivered. "It's great and all, but can we get rid of it already?"

Juvia looked back at Gray. "Well Gray-sama can just—"

"He doesn't know how," Cana interrupted. "Can't you melt it or something, Lyon? It's too damn cold."

Lyon hesitated a moment, before stepping over to the nearest wall so that he could run his hands over the ice covering it. He wore a faint frown as he tapped a finger against the frozen layer. Then he stepped back and let out a low whistle.

"Wow, you really did a number on this place, Gray."

Gray just shrugged, but he was peering at the ice with more interest than Natsu had seen him show in his magic up to this point.

"Yes, we  _know_ ," Can put in, bouncing on the balls of her feet in a vain attempt to warm up. "But can you get rid of it?"

"Nope," Lyon replied. "It's an amazing piece of magic. It's unbelievable how strong it is, especially considering that he couldn't even make a proper shield before."

Cana groaned in dismay. Gray slowly moved away from Erza and drifted over to the shivering girl. Shrugging off his coat, he handed it to her wordlessly. Cana blinked at him in surprise, her shivering temporarily forgotten, and then hesitantly took the jacket from him.

"Um, thanks," she said, flushing slightly.

Gray gave her a crooked smile that was a very  _Gray_ expression. "No problem. I don't mind the cold."

"I could try melting it," Natsu suggested absently, only half paying attention since he was still watching Gray and Cana.

"Like hell you will," Gajeel responded immediately. "It would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? The last thing we need is you trying to burn the place down again."

Natsu rolled his eyes. Really, what were the odds that he would set something else on fire while trying to melt through a little ice? Then he paused and frowned. Knowing himself, that was actually a very real possibility. But still, the others could have a little faith.

"Natsu's the one who set the guild on fire?" Lyon asked. He glanced between Natsu and the ice-covered flames. "Guess I should have suspected that. I'm just surprised that Gray managed to freeze your flames. Freezing fire is hard enough on its own, and your fire is a lot stronger than normal fire."

"Was Gray always that strong?" Erza mused.

"Of course," Juvia said loyally. "Gray-sama has always been very strong."

"And he did get that devil slaying magic during Tartaros," Natsu pointed out.

"He didn't use it just now though," Erza disagreed.

"Yeah, but his new magic could have given a power boost to his normal magic too," Mira replied. "Like a carryover effect."

"Although Gray  _did_ freeze over Natsu's flames before," Happy interjected.

Several people frowned over at him. Natsu thought he knew why. He and Gray fought a lot and they often fought using their magic, but they rarely did something that drastic. Usually they would just block the other's magic or take the hit. Natsu had seen Gray block his fire with shields and things before, but he wasn't sure that he had ever seen his friend actually freeze it. He wasn't sure that he knew what Happy was referencing here.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

The little cat blinked over at him. "In the Tower of Heaven. Remember when that owl guy ate you and used your magic?"

Natsu winced automatically. He liked to ignore that little incident because it had been rather humiliating. As such, he wasn't entirely sure of all the details. Happy had told him that Gray had rescued him, but not much more than that. And Gray…Gray had never actually mentioned the incident at all, not even once, despite all the great teasing material there.

"Owl guy?" Lyon asked.

"Fukuro," Gray answered absently. He had drifted away from Cana and over towards an ice-covered table. He was running his hands across the ice and studying it carefully, not paying much attention to the conversation or what he was saying. "But those flames were a weaker version. Still powerful, but not as strong as they should have been."

A heavy silence descended over the guild for several seconds as they all took that in and tried to decide whether it would be a good idea to press Gray to see if he remembered anything more or if they should pretend like nothing had just happened so that he didn't start withdrawing again. Noticing the change in the atmosphere, Gray turned away from his inspection of his ice and gave his friends a puzzled look. Then he frowned faintly and his gaze seemed to turn inward as he thought back over what he had just said. His eyes widened slightly in understanding as he recalled the words he had said while he wasn't consciously thinking of them. He shifted uncomfortably and Natsu decided that it was high time to change the subject.

"So, if you can't melt it and you won't let me melt it, then how are we gonna get rid of all this ice?" the dragon slayer asked Lyon.

The older ice mage reluctantly tore his gaze away from Gray so that he could look at Natsu again.

"I guess we'll just have to wait for it to melt on its own," he answered. "It'll melt away eventually. Very, very, very slowly." His eyes lit up as he returned his contemplative gaze to Gray. "I can give him an impromptu magic lesson to see if I can teach him how to dispel it. And who knows? Maybe this was the breakthrough he needed in order to be able to start using his magic again. I'll give him some extra lessons and we'll see if we can continue this progress."

"Sounds like a great idea," Erza agreed.

"And in the meantime, maybe the rest of us can take a field trip outside the guild," Gajeel suggested grumpily, "because it's nice and warm outside, and disgustingly cold in here."

There was a heartfelt chorus of agreement and most guild members began drifting outside while Lyon headed for Gray and started trying to explain something or other to him. Natsu was sure it was important and had to do with their magic, but he didn't find it terribly interesting. He was debating whether he should stay or leave, when he remembered Erza. The requip mage had been too distracted by Gray's sudden use of magic to start yelling at Natsu yet, and the dragon slayer thought it might be a good idea to escape while he could.

He was confident that Gray would be alright with Lyon, so he began edging towards the entrance. Erza was still distracted watching Gray and Lyon, so this was Natsu's chance. He would just slip out and disappear for a couple hours. Hopefully Erza would either forget all about him in the excitement about Gray or she would have at least calmed down a little by the time the dragon slayer came back.

Natsu was already halfway out the door when Erza's voice came from behind him.

"And just where do you think you're going, Natsu?"

Slowly, reluctantly, Natsu turned around and took in Erza's blazing eyes and aggressive stance. Apparently it was time to prepare himself for his inevitable demise.

* * *

On the bright side, Natsu survived the encounter with Erza. Of course, his survival was ensured only because of practical benefits to Erza and the rest of Fairy Tail, namely free labor. He spent the next few days replacing or rebuilding every part of the guild that his overzealous flames had damaged, and he was plenty sore while doing it. It wasn't an ideal situation, but he considered himself lucky to get off with just a scolding, a whole host of new bruises, and a boring punishment.

Sadly, the days spent fixing up the guild meant that Natsu had less time to spend with Gray during the day, but the ice mage had plenty to occupy his time as well. The whole experience with freezing over the burning guild had finally gotten Gray interested in his magic, and Lyon was taking full advantage of his new enthusiasm. The Lamia Scale mage had immediately redoubled his efforts with Gray's magic lessons, starting with an attempt to melt the ice that had coated the guild hall. It had taken over an hour, but Gray had eventually figured out how dispel it. Of course, Natsu wasn't able to say  _exactly_ when Gray had managed it or how he had done it, because the dragon slayer had been a little distracted by Erza's violent reprimand at the time.

But Gray  _had_ dispelled it, and he had been getting extra magic lessons with Lyon ever since. In the couple weeks since the incident, he had started making real progress with his magic. He had a lot more control over it now and could perform several basic spells at will. His magic proficiency still wasn't anywhere near the level it had once been, but it was improving by leaps and bounds. It was terribly exciting, especially to Lyon, who had been in a great mood as Gray became more confident and comfortable with both his magic and Lyon himself.

And Lyon wasn't the only one in an abnormally good mood. Gray himself had been much more cheerful and open as of late. There was still that discomfort if anyone mentioned his past and occasionally a slight awkwardness around Lyon or Juvia, but all in all, Gray was in a much better mood than before. His good days were better and so were his bad ones, to the point where Natsu no longer bothered making a distinction between the two since the really bad days seemed like a thing of the past. Gray still didn't often use names or initiate much action on his own, but he was acting a lot more like his old self, making the occasional snarky comment and laughing at the jokes and antics of the guild members. He was more comfortable with interpersonal situations and conversations now, even with Lyon and Juvia. He was still a little wary around Juvia sometimes, but all the extra time spent with Lyon in the magic lessons seemed to have helped him warm up to the other ice mage.

The improvements in Gray's magic and mood had helped put everyone else into better spirits as well, and a general atmosphere of cheery excitement hung over the guild these days. Part of it was, of course, that they were delighted about the progress he was making and hopeful that he would continue improving and maybe even make a breakthrough with his memories soon. The other part was just that Gray had been very out of sorts and generally unhappy and withdrawn since his return from the void, and it made everyone feel better to see him happy again. It had been disheartening and frustrating for them to have to watch someone they cared about be so unhappy and apprehensive all the time, without feeling like they could really help him.

So it was like a chain reaction, starting with Gray's improvements and new enthusiasm and leading to an improved mood for everyone else as well. Natsu found the whole thing exciting and was starting to think that nothing could ruin the air of celebration.

Nothing but Porlyusica, anyway.

The misanthropic medicine woman's visits had become more and more spread out over time. When Gray was first rescued she had come to check up on him every few days, and then every couple weeks. Now she only came once or twice a month, and today was the lucky day. Natsu was, understandably, a little concerned. He always seemed to be the main target of her wrath, and although he hadn't really screwed up since her last visit—aside from almost burning down the guild—he was sure that she would find something to gripe at him for.

As it happened, she ended up being too interested in Gray's sudden progress to really focus on chewing out Natsu. She even seemed a little less snappish than usual, and actually looked vaguely pleased at one point when Gray had given her a dazzling smile and demonstrated his new control over his magic. Natsu chose not to comment on it since he was certain that would get him a tongue-lashing, but it was a good reminder of why she still came on these visits even though there didn't seem to be much need of her anymore.

After all these months with no ill effects, no one was really expecting Gray to suddenly go into seizures or start coughing up blood or anything like that. They all knew that Gray was doing well physically, but no one asked Porlyusica to stop coming. After all, it was still reassuring to hear that he was okay from the mouth of an expert. The real reason, though, was that they all knew that she had taken a keen interest in Gray's well-being and recovery, even if they would never say it to her face. All the same, there really wasn't much for her to do these days besides give Gray a quick once-over and pronounce him healthy. That was about all she had done and said on her last half-dozen visits or so, but today she had something to add.

"I think he should become more independent," she said after her inspection of Gray. Stepping back, she surveyed him critically and then turned her sharp gaze to Natsu, who raised an eyebrow in return.

"He's a lot more independent than he was," the dragon slayer offered. "Erza's been showing him around the city, and he knows his way around pretty well now."

Porlyusica scowled. "That doesn't make him independent," she shot back irritably. "You still live with him?"

"Yes…" Natsu said slowly, not sure that he would like where this was going.

"Well stop."

Natsu stared at her in disbelief for a moment and then gave her a ferocious scowl of his own. Forgetting his apprehension of her sour temper and sharp tongue, he immediately protested.

"That's stupid," he spat. "He doesn't have his memories, you know. We can't just leave him alone."

Porlyusica sent him an impressive glare, but he refused to be cowed. This was too important an issue for him to back down on.

"I didn't say you had to abandon him," she said impatiently. "You would still be around him in the guild and such. But he has a heavy dependence on you and you know it. It's not as bad as it was when you first rescued him and he looked to you for everything, but he still relies on you far too much.

"I see two ways this could unfold," she continued, fixing Natsu with a hard stare. "The first possibility is that he never regains his memories. In that case, he needs to learn how to survive in the world on his own instead of just playing this waiting game to see if his memories will magically reappear. In the most practical sense, it's necessary for him to become independent so that he can figure out how to make a fresh start."

Natsu took a half-step back as he stared at her in disbelieving shock. Then his anger and determination blazed up and he leaned forward, staring at her with smoldering eyes.

"That's giving up," he accused. "Gray  _will_ get his memories back."

Porlyusica waved him off impatiently. "Yes, yes, but you need to face the facts. It's been months since you brought him back, and he still hasn't regained his memories. He's been making progress—phenomenal progress, even—but you have to accept the possibility that he might be like this forever. These fleeting snippets of partial memories might be the closest thing to normal he will ever get. I'm not saying that he won't recover, but it  _is_ a distinct possibility."

They stared at each other wordlessly for a few moments, before Natsu narrowed his eyes and averted his gaze. It wasn't like he didn't know that was a possibility, but it wasn't something he liked to think about. He had always been good at pulling off the impossible, and he intended to do the same thing here. He wasn't going to give up until Gray had his memories back, because Natsu still felt horrible about leaving his friend behind in the first place and he didn't know what he would do if Gray never fully recovered. It made him sick to think about. He'd still like Gray for who he was now, but he really, really wanted his best friend back.

"And the other possibility?" he asked, subdued.

Porlyusica sighed, and Natsu could've sworn that her tone softened just a little when she spoke again.

"The other possibility is that he  _will_ eventually get his memories back," she said. "But even in that case, it would be a good idea to give him more independence. It might help him start regaining more memories if he settles back into his normal, pre-amnesia routines. Right now you're interfering with that normalcy. Besides, you should give him some space so that he can work things out on his own. It might help him make more sense of his memories, and he needs to start remembering how to do things for himself. You can't live for him—he needs to figure these things out himself. Giving him more independence could help him regain his memories faster, and even if it doesn't, he'll need to learn how to survive on his own anyway."

Natsu didn't respond immediately. He could see the sense in Porlyusica's thought process, but he still wasn't sure if it was a good idea. He still wanted to take care of Gray, needed to be there in case something went wrong again. He didn't like the idea of leaving Gray alone, and he wasn't sure if Gray was ready for that yet. But then again, maybe the point Porlyusica was trying to make was that Gray would never be ready unless Natsu let him go so that he could figure things out on his own.

"What do you suggest then?" Erza asked, finally butting into the conversation. She didn't look overly thrilled either, but there was already a resigned acceptance in her voice. Apparently she agreed with Porlyusica's reasoning.

The healer glanced over at Erza. "He needs to live on his own, for one," she said firmly.

"But what if something happens?" Natsu burst out. "What if something happens and he needs me? I can't—I can't not be there again."

Erza gave him a sad and knowing look, and even Porlyusica looked almost sympathetic for a split second. Natsu clenched his jaw and looked away, not wanting to see their pity.

"It would still be a good idea to check in on him every once in a while if you thought it necessary," Porlyusica told him. "You could walk him to his apartment at night and meet him there in the mornings to walk him back to the guild if you really wanted to, although I'd suggest you only do that for a few days or so before you let him do it on his own. You're going to have to trust him to be able to take care of himself. But it is true that you might want to be a little cautious at first, until you know how he's going to handle it. He lives in an apartment, doesn't he?"

Erza nodded in agreement. "He does."

"Then surely he has a landlord or fellow tenant living nearby, yes? Perhaps you could ask them to look in on him every once in a while as a safeguard to make sure that he's doing alright while you aren't with him, and if anything goes wrong then they could send for you," Porlyusica suggested.

"His landlady would do that, if we asked her," Lyon broke in. "She likes Gray and we could trust her to be careful and take it seriously."

Natsu gave the other man a disbelieving look. "You're actually okay with this?" he asked incredulously. He had expected that at least Lyon would be on his side here. The other mage was nearly as overprotective as Natsu himself.

Lyon grimaced faintly but met Natsu's gaze steadily. "I don't like it," he said stiffly. "I don't like it, but I think that she's right."

Natsu's hands curled into helpless fists, but there was nothing for him to fight. He knew this was a losing battle, and it felt like things were quickly slipping out of control. Things had been going so well, but this could change everything. Maybe it would help things, but it could also make everything so much worse. Natsu wasn't sure that he wanted to take that risk.

"You've been living with him for a long time now," Lucy told him. She still seemed a little unsure about the whole idea and was sympathetic to his cause, but Natsu could tell that she was going to take Porlyusica's side as well. "I'm sure he's picked up all the basics of apartment life from you already. Plus he's doing a lot better so he should be better able to take care of himself, and we'll still be able to see him at the guild during the day, which is most of the time anyway."

Natsu ground his teeth together and said nothing. There was nothing he could say at this point, not when everyone else was lining up against him. Then someone abruptly elbowed him in the side and he jerked his head around to see that Gray had sidled up next to him. The ice mage had stayed out of the conversation up to this point, just watching apprehensively from the sidelines, but he had apparently decided to step in now.

He gave Natsu a conspiratorial grin. "Well, at least this way I won't have to eat bacon for breakfast every day," he teased the dragon slayer.

Natsu blinked at him in surprise for a second and then started laughing. The laugh was partly brittle and panicky, but also genuinely amused. The ice mage kept his grin in place, but Natsu could see the uncertainty and nervousness in his eyes. The dragon slayer wasn't the only one who was worried about the sudden change. Gray had relied heavily on Natsu for the past months and had formed a closer connection and trust with him than with anyone else. Having that taken away from him when the rest of the world still seemed so strange and mysterious must be frightening for Gray.

And yet, looking into Gray's eyes, Natsu could see that his friend was willing to go through with this anyway, despite his worries. If Gray could do it then Natsu should be able to, but…Natsu's mouth twisted into a grimace. He wasn't sure that he could make himself let Gray go again, even in such a nonpermanent way.

Apparently Gray could sense it too. The ice mage's grin faded to an almost melancholy smile.

"Just because you won't be with me every minute of the day doesn't mean that I'll forget about you." He gave Natsu a meaningful look. "And it's not really leaving if you're planning on coming back."

For a second, Natsu couldn't breathe properly. That last statement almost sounded like a direct reference to Natsu's guilt over leaving Gray after Tartaros and coming back to find him 'dead'. Gray might not be able to remember what had happened, but Natsu wondered how well his friend actually understood his mental state just from living with the dragon slayer and dealing with him every day.

Natsu let out a breath and nodded once. He didn't like it, but if Gray was willing to try it then he was too. Gray picked up on Natsu's change in attitude and his smirk returned.

"Oh good," the ice mage said. "I really am getting tired of bacon."

Natsu laughed.

And despite his reservations, he moved out the next day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eh, this is a kind of transition-y chapter. Sorry about the info dump and crap. I was impatient to get on with things by this point.
> 
> Why yes, Gray's bid for independence is the main reason that I ever bothered introducing the landlady. It seems more logical to kick Natsu out if there's still someone around to keep an eye on Gray. Or that was my reasoning, anyway. And, of course, Gray living on his own is important for a later event. It's a tangled web I weave, my friends. A tangled web XD


	20. Ch 19-Team Natsu Plus Lyon takes a job

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, I'm going to be very upfront with you guys: this is basically a filler chapter. I honestly just needed to have a chapter to break up the last chapter from what will happen next chapter. The scene I'd originally planned for this didn't pan out, so it was kind of tossed together at the last minute. On the other hand, enjoy the happiness and fluff while it lasts. After this point stuff is going to start getting more plot-heavy again.

* * *

**Chapter 19**

_(In which Team Natsu Plus Lyon takes a job and epic snowball fight commences.)_

* * *

Natsu was a nervous wreck for the first few days after moving out, but things soon settled back into a new routine. He and Happy would show up at Gray's apartment at nine o'clock sharp—well, as sharp as could be reasonably expected when Natsu was known for being late to everything—every morning, occasionally harass the landlady with anxious questions about any changes in Gray's state of well-being since they had last seen him, sometimes eat breakfast with Gray, and then walk to the guild with him. The activities they did at the guild itself varied slightly from day to day, because Gray had taken up a new and varied routine. He still went on walks with Erza and sometimes other guild members, had frequent magic lessons with Lyon, and did whatever random activities the others asked him to do, but some new things had been added to his plate as well, as his friends started looking for new ways to get him involved in things.

Everyone wanted to feel like they were contributing to his progress, so many of them had worked on creating a role for themselves in Gray's life. Lucy had begun showing him snippets of whatever it was she was writing and told him stories about the jobs she went on. Juvia often followed him around like a lost puppy dog and was insistent on eating lunch with him several times a week. Erza had the walks, of course, but she also took it upon herself to tell Gray stories as well, although she was careful that they weren't ones that heavily involved his past. Aside from the magic lessons, Lyon had also started to tease Gray mercilessly, which the younger ice mage didn't seem to mind anymore, usually taking it good-naturedly and joining in the banter. Watching them together was like looking at a snapshot of the past. The other guild members also took on minor niche roles from time to time, and everything was going well.

Natsu always hung around as well, the ever-faithful Happy by his side, keeping an eye on Gray and occasionally badgering him. The dragon slayer hadn't felt comfortable enough to actually start a fight with Gray for old time's sake, but teasing banter wasn't off-limits. Luckily, Gray had regained much of his old sense of humor and was a lot more talkative these days. Aside from the lack of memories and continued reluctance to call his friends by name, he was starting to seem a little more normal again, and Natsu wondered if perhaps Porlyusica's idea had had some merit after all.

There were still times when Gray would get a blank look on his face or become uncomfortable with something someone said or would just act in a generally puzzling way, but those instances were less common now. He had even stopped writing in that notebook of his. Natsu couldn't say exactly when that habit had stopped, but at some point several days after he had moved out, the dragon slayer had realized that he hadn't seen the notebook for a couple days and it had never reappeared again since then. He wasn't sure if it was necessarily a  _good_ thing, but it was an adjustment back to normalcy so it could hardly be bad. For the sake of his curiosity he was still tempted to hunt it down and read what was in it, but after a week and a half of not seeing it, he gradually forgot about it as he focused on more important aspects of Gray's recovery.

So it was all well and good, except for the fact that since Natsu was no longer staying with Gray, he had conveniently forgotten that the ice mage still needed money to eat and currently had no ability to earn it. Natsu and Happy stopped by Gray's house a little early one morning a couple weeks after moving out, intending to eat breakfast with him. Gray let them in the apartment and then disappeared back into the bathroom to finish getting ready to go. While they waited, Natsu and Happy raided the fridge, deciding to start on breakfast.

The first thing they noticed was that there was no bacon, which was terribly disappointing, especially for Natsu. The second thing they noticed was that there wasn't much of anything else either.

"I was going to go to the market yesterday."

Natsu hurriedly stood up from where he was crouching in front of the fridge and turned to face Gray. The ice mage was leaning in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched Natsu and Happy with an amused expression.

"Then why didn't you?" Happy asked. "We would have gone with you if you asked."

Gray shrugged. "I can get to the store on my own. It's not like I've never done it before. I didn't go this time because I realized that the money was running out and there wasn't much of a point going to the store if I couldn't buy anything."

"Oh!" Natsu exclaimed, penitent. He felt that this was something he had overlooked, something that he should have seen coming and prepared for. In a way, he had failed in his duties and he felt a little bad about it. "You should have said something."

Gray smirked, not seeming to be bothered by Natsu's oversight. "I just did," the ice mage said wryly, his dark eyes shining with amusement.

Natsu rolled his eyes. "You should have said something before now," he clarified.

"I just realized it last night," Gray replied with a dismissive shrug. "It's not a big deal."

Natsu bit his lip as he puzzled out the best course of action. He turned to Happy, and the little cat looked back at him.

"We did some jobs a couple weeks ago," he said slowly. "How much leftover do we still have?"

"Not very much," Happy said with a frown. "We were just talking about having to do another job a couple days ago, remember?"

Natsu sighed, wishing he had thought to plan this out better. Since Gray wasn't as uncomfortable around the other guild members anymore and had started spending more time with them during the day, Natsu and Happy had had more time to do the occasional job. They could have even gone back on a more normal job schedule, really, but Natsu was still nervous about leaving Gray for too long. It wasn't that he didn't trust the others to take care of the ice mage, but Natsu was still paranoid about any possibility that something might happen to Gray while he was gone. So he and Happy—and oftentimes Lucy as well—would usually just take a couple of jobs around the city instead of taking on the bigger requests. They occasionally did some jobs a little outside the city too, but nothing that required them to be away overnight.

All that had the benefit of making sure that they weren't away from Gray for too long, but the downside was that they weren't exactly raking in the money. But surely they must have enough extra to leave some with Gray while they ran out on an emergency job run.

"Okay, so we'll go eat breakfast at the guild today," Natsu said slowly, marshalling his thoughts. Gray and Happy both nodded in acquiescence. "And then you and I will go on a job today and we can split the reward between us and Gray," he added to Happy.

The Exceed nodded, seeing it as a reasonable course of action. Gray, on the other hand, looked less than thrilled. A faint scowl worked its way over his face and he suddenly had a stubborn, defensive gleam in his eyes. Natsu frowned as well, trying to figure out what was so bad about his plan. He had thought that it was practical enough.

"What's wrong?" he asked Gray.

Startled out of his thoughts, Gray looked up and met Natsu's gaze. The out-of-place expression vanished, though his brows knit into a slightly puzzled frown as if he too was trying to figure out what had just happened. Natsu would normally think that something he had said had triggered one of those half-formed flashes of memory, but nothing he had said related to the past in any way. He didn't know what else might have bothered Gray.

"Nothing," the ice mage said after a brief pause.

Natsu's first impulse was to badger Gray until he got an answer, but he bit his tongue. He didn't think that Gray was intentionally hiding things from him. In fact, Gray's faint bewilderment suggested that the ice mage himself wasn't certain of what had just happened or where it had come from. Maybe it had just been a brief feeling or stray thought that had suddenly resurfaced for a moment before fading away again. And if that was the case, questioning Gray would get Natsu exactly nowhere.

"Well, why don't we head to the guild then?" Natsu suggested, exchanging a glance with Happy, who also seemed confused.

The walk to the guild was surprisingly comfortable and upbeat, because Gray's earlier odd moment of irritation had quickly faded and the ice mage chatted cheerfully the whole way to the hall. Happy also seemed to put the incident out of his mind once it became apparent that there were apparently no ill effects, and he laughed along with Gray. Natsu joined in the banter too, but was also a little distracted. It was true that it had been such a small slip that it probably wasn't important, but although Natsu wasn't actually worried about it, he  _was_ a little curious. He didn't know what he had said that would have made Gray react that way.

They were already walking into the guild when Natsu finally came up with a theory. His first thought had been that maybe Gray wasn't thrilled that Natsu had said that he and Happy would be going on a job and therefore wouldn't be around today, but he was also sure that if that was the case then Gray would have just come out and said that. The ice mage hadn't been bothered any of the other times the dragon slayer and Exceed went out on jobs, and aside from that, something that involved only the present moment and not the past was unlikely to elicit such a subconscious response. If Gray hadn't really been aware of his reaction or the reason behind it, then it was reasonable to assume that whatever had caused it was at least related to the past in some way or had enough of a connection to it to stir up some emotion.

The only other thing that Natsu had said between the time Gray was acting normal and the time he got that weird look on his face was that he and Happy would split the reward between themselves and Gray. Post-void Gray wouldn't have any reason to be bothered by that and had never before shown any discomfort with taking money Natsu had earned, but the old Gray  _would_ have. Now that he thought about it, that look on Gray's face looked an awful lot like the old Gray's expression of injured pride, the look he had worn when someone had stepped on his pride and he felt the need to defend it. And the old Gray would definitely have felt that way if Natsu had offered him anything perceived as charity or pity aid. He would have insisted that he could take care of himself, thank you very much, and didn't need any of Natsu's money. Maybe that characteristic had suddenly resurfaced for a moment, triggered by Natsu's suggestion.

Natsu studied Gray thoughtfully as the ice mage cheerfully greeted the other guild members, wondering if he was on to somethin.

"And Natsu and I are going to have to go on a job today," Happy was telling Erza.

"Change of plans, Happy," the dragon slayer interrupted. Both the Exceed and the requip mage looked over at him, puzzled. Natsu just grinned. "I think it's about time we get the team back together again, don't you?"

Lucy drifted over, listening in on the conversation, and frowned a little. "I would love that," she said, "but it…it wouldn't be the same without Gray."

Natsu raised an eyebrow at her. "I said the team, not the team minus Gray," he replied.

Everyone else's confusion quickly turned into an interesting mixture of surprise and disbelief.

"What in the world are you thinking?" Lucy asked automatically, her eyes widening. "Gray can't go on jobs!"

"It might be better if we just stick with the original plan," Happy added, giving Natsu a worried look.

The dragon slayer just waited patiently— _somewhat_  patiently—for the inevitable protests to die down and the initial shock to wear off. He glanced over at Gray, more interested in the ice mage's reaction than anyone else's. He could win the others over if he needed to, but he wanted to make sure that his suggestion was well-received by Gray himself before he decided to push it. Gray looked a little nonplussed and concerned, but also rather intrigued, interest sparking in his eyes. Natsu took that as a good sign. The dragon slayer turned back to the others.

"Look, I was against moving out in the first place, but it seems to have been working out so far. Didn't Porlyusica say that the point of all this was for him to become more independent? Part of becoming independent is letting him do jobs like he used to so that he can earn his own upkeep," Natsu explained reasonably.

The others exchanged looks as they considered that.

"Well yes, but is Gray really ready for that?" Lucy asked, not yet convinced. "I mean, I agree that it might help with this independence thing, but…"

Luckily Natsu had taken a few seconds to plan out his logic before suggesting this idea, so he thought that he could present a good case and set everyone's concerns to rest.

"It would obviously be an easy job to start out with," he began. "Nothing really dangerous, but something where he would have the opportunity to do a normal job and practice his magic in a real-world setting. We'd still be there to supervise and help out of course, but it would be good for him to tag along and get back into the swing of things. Think about it: you want him to become more independent, right? This is a necessary part of that.

"I'm thinking that maybe we should ask Lyon to come too. It would probably be good for Gray to be able to find a practical use for his magic and all those lessons he's been getting, instead of just doing random practice exercises and whatever. Lyon could also help us keep an eye on him and continue to advise him on his magic. If anything goes wrong on that front, Lyon would be the one of us best qualified to fix it and give Gray advice."

Erza, Lucy, and Happy still looked a little reluctant, but they also seemed to be warming to the idea. Gray actually looked downright pleased, a faint smile playing on his face and a satisfied gleam in his eyes. Natsu figured that was an improvement since it was just a few weeks before that he hadn't shown much of an interest in anything.

"I'm kind of surprised that you're the one who brought this up," Erza remarked thoughtfully. "You know, with how overprotective you've been and how unhappy you were about Gray's bid for independence."

Natsu scowled. "I'm not overprotective," he grumbled. Everyone gave him pointed, skeptical looks, and Gray actually started snickering. Natsu rolled his eyes. "Whatever," he muttered. It's not like he could really deny it. "So, are you on board?"

There was a brief pause.

"I'm not against the idea," Erza said finally. "You've made a good case and I do agree that it's probably good to continue helping him become more independent, but I think that it should be up to Gray." She looked over at the ice mage. "Do you want to come on a job?" she asked him.

He hesitated a moment, glancing at each of them in turn, until his eyes finally settled on Natsu again. "Sure," he answered.

"And you're not just saying yes because Natsu suggested it?" Lucy pressed.

Gray rolled his eyes and tossed his head. "Oh please," he scoffed. "Like I take orders from that idiot."

Then he suddenly froze, a frown spreading over his face. It must have been something that he had said without thinking again, something that had bled through his subconscious from his past. After all, post-void Gray had been awfully dependent on Natsu until recently and would still usually do whatever the dragon slayer asked, and the ice mage wouldn't have gotten that look on his face if it had been something that he would normally say. All the same, no one chose to comment on it. They'd learned their lesson about that.

"Well, if he wants to go then maybe we should try it," Erza said briskly. "We'll take a trial job, see how it goes, and then determine whether or not he's ready to go on any more. Is everyone in agreement?"

Lucy and Happy nodded.

"Great!" Natsu said cheerfully. "Now we just need to find Lyon and pick out a job, and we're set to go."

"I can do both of those at once," Lyon said suddenly, materializing beside Natsu. The dragon slayer jumped a foot in the air at his unexpected appearance, and the older ice mage smirked at him. "I already picked a job for us." Lyon held up a job request.

"Oh, you heard us talking?" Happy asked.

Lyon rolled his eyes. "The whole guild heard you talking," he replied dryly.

Natsu glanced around, and sure enough, everyone was watching them. Most people seemed enthusiastic about this apparent leap forward in Gray's progress, although a few still looked a little concerned about how things would pan out.

"Oh," Natsu said. Then he shrugged dismissively and snatched the job request out of Lyon's hand. Skimming over it quickly, he felt his eyebrows shoot upwards. "Mt. Hakobe? Why did you have to pick somewhere so cold?"

Lyon looked at him like he was stupid. "Because I'm an ice mage and I like the cold," he said, letting out a long-suffering sigh. Natsu kind of wanted to punch him in the face. With how things were now, he couldn't very well fight Gray when the younger ice mage was annoying, but Lyon was a whole other story. "Besides, I think Gray will like it too."

Some of Natsu's irritation receded. Yeah, he thought that Gray might like it there. He always had before all this, anyway. Natsu supposed that he couldn't say no to a mission in the cold when it was presented that way.

While he was distracted, Lucy grabbed the request out of his hands so that she could read it too. "Vulcans?" she asked. "I don't know, shouldn't we maybe pick something where he has less of a chance of getting hurt?"

Lyon scowled, obviously not liking the implication that he was intentionally putting Gray in harm's way. "Vulcans are hardly tough opponents, and we're only looking to flush out a nest of a half-dozen or so. Besides," he added, giving her a hard look, "it's not like I'm going to let him get hurt."

Lucy bit her lip and looked reluctant to raise any more concerns in case Lyon got huffy again.

"I don't know what you're so worried about," Gray said suddenly. He glanced between Natsu and Lyon, an amused expression plastered on his face. "Between these two, I'll be lucky if I even get to  _see_ a vulcan, much less get hurt by one."

They all stared at him for a second, and then Natsu and Lyon exchanged looks and burst out laughing. Okay, so it might be true that they were just a  _little_ overprotective. Lucy and Erza smiled, and some of their worry faded away at Gray's reassurance and teasing. Gray watched them with an amused, maybe a little fond, half-smile. Natsu also thought that he detected a faint wistfulness there, but it was gone so quickly that he might have imagined it.

"Well, let's get going then," Erza ordered.

As they waved goodbye to the rest of the guild and headed for the mountain, Natsu reflected that it was nice to have the team together on a job again. It was different, of course, with Gray still being an amnesiac and Lyon tagging along, but it was closer to what they had once had. And between all the teasing and joking and laughing, it was enjoyable enough.

Even the base of the mountain was covered in snow this time of year and it seemed to interest Gray, who looked pleased by the winter wonderland that Natsu found so mildly distasteful. It also seemed to have another effect as well. As soon as they hit the snow, Gray began leisurely peeling his shirt off.

"Don't do that," Lyon told him.

Gray arched an eyebrow, gave him a catlike grin, and defiantly dropped his shirt behind him in the snow. "You've gone soft," he teased. "Training in snowy mountains with a shirt on is sacrilege."

Lyon looked startled for a moment and bit his lip, and Natsu wondered if that statement meant something to him. It sounded almost like one of those random tidbits from the past that Gray would throw out there from time to time without even realizing it. It wouldn't surprise Natsu, especially because of the deliberative, conscious way Gray had stripped his shirt off. His stripping had drastically decreased since he had come back from the void. There had been a few occasions when he lost his shirt at random times and didn't seem to know where it had gone, but those times were few and far between now. Besides, Gray always seemed a little disconcerted and uncomfortable when his clothing disappeared now, so if he was deliberately taking it off then he must have a reason.

"Fine," Lyon said, slipping out of his own shirt. "But keep your pants. It's not like this is really training."

Gray snorted. "Isn't it? This whole thing is supposed to be for training me for the 'real world' or whatever."

"I suppose so," Lyon conceded. "But then again, there's no need to nag me then." He stuck his nose in the air in a haughty gesture. "I'm the master this time."

"Ha, yeah right," Gray grumbled. "Besides, the master has to strip just the same. How else would weird habits like this get started?"

Lyon paused mid-step and looked away, his eyes narrowing and clouding over with something Natsu couldn't read. Then he continued on walking like nothing had happened.

"Yeah," he said, his voice subdued. "That's true."

Natsu saw a movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced back to see Erza picking up the discarded shirts and stowing them away as she shook her head in amused exasperation. Well, at least someone was thinking ahead.

The rest of the trip up the mountain was uneventful, although Gray and Lyon snarked back and forth the whole time until Erza finally got annoyed and put an end to it. It probably would have been better if she'd gotten tired of it earlier though. Natsu had been so distracted listening to the banter and occasionally adding a comment of his own that he didn't hear the vulcans until they were almost on top of them.

Luckily, he picked up their scent just before the team walked right past the entrance to the cave that the creatures had commandeered for a den. Natsu didn't usually bother with vulcans as long as they weren't causing trouble, but apparently these ones had been making raids on a couple of areas near the base of the mountain, so they needed to be taken care of. It was kind of strange behavior for vulcans, but who could understand what went on in their heads anyway?

There turned out to be seven of them, which was a little more than Natsu had expected but still not enough to be a real problem. No, the closest thing to a problem was the previously unnoticed eighth vulcan who snuck up behind them, presumably escaping the cave through a side entrance that they hadn't seen. It was still only one vulcan and shouldn't have been a big deal, except that Gray had pretty much been shunted to the back of the group so that the others were between him and the creatures, so it was Gray that the eighth vulcan attacked first.

Luckily, Gray still seemed to retain some of his basic instincts and he automatically ducked out of the way and lashed out with his magic. His magic was still nowhere near as good as it had once been, but at least it was enough to save him this time. Lyon had made sure to stay near Gray the whole time and once he realized what had happened, he immediately abandoned the main offensive and went to Gray's aid. The two ice mages ended up tag-teaming the unexpected foe, and Natsu had to admit that they actually worked well together. Gray's somewhat erratic magic settled into a more normal and controlled pattern when he had Lyon guiding him, and he appeared more confident and at ease when the older mage was with him.

"That could have been bad," Lucy remarked as they finished wiping out the vulcans and began heading back down the mountain.

"But it wasn't," Natsu insisted, eager to make sure that this minor hiccup didn't make the others wary of possibly taking Gray out on more jobs.

"At least Lyon was with him," Erza said with a sigh, glancing over at the two ice mages.

Gray smirked. "Oh, it was terribly exciting," he said cheerfully. "I actually got to see one after all."

Natsu started snickering, but broke off abruptly when Erza glared at him.

"I thought you were supposed to stay with him too," she said accusingly.

Natsu looked away and cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Uh, yeah. I guess I got a little too excited about finally getting a good fight and I might've gotten a little distracted," he mumbled sheepishly.

The pass widened into a large, gently sloping, snowy field that went on a good ways before dropping back into a narrow path down the side of the mountain. Now that there was more room to move, Natsu inched away from Erza a little, just in case.

"It's like you lose whatever brain you have as soon as you get into a fight," the requip mage replied, shaking her head in exasperation.

"It's been a long time since he's really gotten to fight anything since we've mostly been taking lame jobs in the city," Happy offered, trying to soothe Erza. "And you know how he gets when he hasn't been fighting for a while."

"Way too over-excited," Lucy muttered.

Natsu rolled his eyes. "It's not like I left him alone or anything. Lyon was there."

Okay, so maybe Natsu felt a  _little_ bad about getting so excited that he had jumped right into the fight and ended up drifting away from Gray, but at the same time, things had worked out fine. Lyon had been there, and despite how annoying Natsu found the Lamia Scale mage to be sometimes, he also trusted him to have Gray's back.

Erza opened her mouth to say something else, but broke off when Gray's voice suddenly came from behind them.

"Hey, Lyon!"

They all spun around, partially out of shock that Gray had actually used someone's name, and partially out of surprise since they had been so distracted by their argument that they hadn't even realized that he had fallen several paces behind them.

Lyon opened his mouth, probably to ask what Gray wanted, but before he could speak, a snowball hit him right in the face. He spluttered in surprise and hurriedly wiped the snow off his face so that he could glare at Gray. The younger ice mage was standing a few feet away, an unbearably smug smirk plastered on his face.

"Seriously?" Lyon griped. "Are you a child?"

Gray's grin widened. "Are you worried because I was always better at this?" he taunted. "You aren't afraid of losing, are you?"

Lyon drew himself up to his full height. "I'll have you know that I am a champion snowball fighter," he snapped. "And when we were kids, I always won."

"Ha! That's a lie and you know it," Gray shot back.

Lyon hesitated a moment as if remembering something, but then shrugged. "Fine, but I was still better than—"

Gray's arm moved so fast that Natsu barely saw him launch the second snowball at Lyon. The dragon slayer hadn't even realized that his friend had been holding another one. This snowball hit Lyon in the face as well, and the older man reeled back in shock.

"That's not fair!" he said petulantly.

"At least I didn't hide a chunk of ice in it," Gray said unsympathetically.

"Oh come on, that was  _one_ time—"

Lyon broke off and frowned at Gray thoughtfully. Natsu got the feeling that this was another one of those half-memories. But that didn't bother him too much right now, because he was still distracted by the hilarious look that had been on Lyon's face when he had gotten smacked by another snowball. The dragon slayer started laughing.

Lyon glared over at him. "Shut up," the older mage grumbled.

"You should have seen your face!" Natsu howled, doubling over with laughter.

And then a snowball whacked him in the face. It actually hit so hard that the dragon slayer stumbled back a half-step, his arms windmilling through the air to prevent himself from toppling over. Slowly brushing the remnants of the snowy missile out of his eyes, he blinked over at Gray uncomprehendingly for a second. The younger ice mage was wearing a sly half-smile and his eyes twinkled with barely contained mirth.

"Oh, it's on!" Natsu exclaimed, hurriedly bending over to make some snowballs of his own.

As it turned out, whatever else Gray might have forgotten, he was still damn good at snowball fights. Not even Lyon could keep up with him. Gray honestly seemed revitalized as he leapt about in the snow, laughing and bombarding everyone with snowballs. He almost seemed like a kid again, and it had been a long time since Natsu had seen him so carefree and uninhibited. And that included pre-void times too.

Gray's enthusiasm and good cheer were contagious, and soon everyone was running around and tossing snowballs at each other, the earlier fiasco and heated discussion instantly forgotten. Lucy and Happy formed a team—which Natsu was displeased with, that traitorous feline—but everyone else went solo, aside from a disjointed effort on everyone's part to land a hit on Gray. Erza threw snowballs hard enough to hurt and Lyon was like a machine, but it was Gray who was the clear winner. Every time someone actually hit him with a snowball, there were grand celebrations. Celebrations that usually ended with the temporary victor getting smacked with a returning snowball, courtesy of Gray.

Since they were out on a flat plain of sorts, there was space for everyone to run around and chase after each other. Natsu was chasing a fleeing Lucy towards the jagged cliff face rising up into a sheer wall on the other side of the field, intending to corner her and nail her with the enormous, dragon-worthy snowball he had made. He was laughing maniacally as she yelled at him to leave her alone, when Gray suddenly shouted after them.

"Stop!" the younger ice mage called.

Natsu was inclined to think that this was another dirty trick on Gray's part, so he turned slightly and made to throw the giant snowball at him instead. Gray was running after them, his expression suddenly worried instead of playful. He easily dodged the snowy projectile and kept right on going.

Natsu frowned. "What?" he asked.

But Gray wasn't looking at him. He was looking at Lucy.

"Stop running!" he yelled after her again.

Either Lucy wasn't paying attention or she didn't detect the note of concern in his voice. Or maybe she just didn't realize that he was talking to her since he didn't use her name. Whatever the case, she kept running as if the dragon slayer was still chasing her with a massive snowball.

Natsu stood still and looked after them with a bewildered frown as Gray cursed under his breath and sped up. The ice mage was a faster runner than Lucy, and he had almost caught up to her when Natsu heard the sharp crack that came from under their feet. The dragon slayer's brow furrowed in confusion. It had sounded almost like ice, but there was only snow there. Unless…His eyes widened. Unless there was ice-covered water underneath the snow.

Gray reached out and grabbed Lucy, his fingers closing about her arm. The celestial spirit mage screeched in surprise, but Gray barely spared her another glance as he adjusted his grip and put as much force into tossing her as he could. She went flying through the air back towards Natsu and the others and crashed into a snowdrift. She popped out of the snowbank and opened her mouth to yell at Gray indignantly, but that was the moment that the ice she had just been standing on cracked and gave out, sending Gray plunging into the frigid water below.

"Oh my God," she breathed, her eyes widening as her hands covered her mouth.

"Shit," Natsu cursed, starting to run forward before he realized that he would probably break through the ice too and do absolutely no good for Gray.

"Stay back," Lyon snapped at him. "I'll get him. I can sense the state of the ice."

The older ice mage hurried towards where Gray had disappeared, cautiously picking his way across the unseen ice but still moving as quickly as he could without breaking it. Gray's head broke the surface and he coughed violently as he treaded water. His eyes locked on Lyon and he grimaced.

"Back up," he warned. "The ice is really unstable."

Lyon paused, a torn look on his face. Gray tried to pull himself out of the water, but the ice he grabbed on to broke away in his hands. He cursed quietly under his breath, but looked more irritated than afraid.

"Are you okay?" Lucy asked worriedly, twisting her hands together in a mixture of apprehension and guilt.

"Yeah, just give me a second to get out of here," he replied, unfazed. He seemed perfectly unconcerned, if a little annoyed, at the situation he had found himself in.

Erza ran up and stopped beside Natsu. "Happy, go pull him out," she said, glancing back at where the Exceed was racing over.

"Aye sir!"

Happy dove out of the air and grabbed on to Gray, tugging him out of the water with a little difficulty. Natsu supposed that it would have been easier if Gray had still been wearing a shirt. Or if he wasn't currently waterlogged.

Once Lyon was sure that Happy's rescue mission was succeeding, he slowly retreated back to where the others were watching the proceedings anxiously. The Exceed managed to carry Gray over to the others before dropping him into the snow.

"Thanks," Gray told him, picking himself up off the ground and grimacing down at his sodden pants.

"Are you okay?" Lucy asked again, immediately beginning to fuss over him.

He rolled his eyes and stepped back out of her reach. "It's okay," he said. "I'm fine." To underscore his point, he sneezed.

"Why didn't you just refreeze the ice?" Lyon asked, looking him over anxiously.

Natsu thought that was a damn good question. For his part, Gray blinked at Lyon slowly as he considered that, and then shrugged sheepishly.

"Dunno. Guess I didn't really think about it in the heat of the moment. And my magic is still kind of hard to use properly sometimes." He laughed awkwardly. "I guess that would've been the smart thing to do though, huh?"

"How did you know that we were on thin ice?" Natsu asked curiously. "I didn't even hear it creaking until you were almost to Lucy."

Gray shrugged. "I don't know. I guess I could sense the ice," he answered, although he didn't sound as if he really understood why he could do that. Natsu recalled that Lyon had said almost exactly the same thing when he was going to fetch Gray, and figured that it must be an ice mage thing. "My guess is that there must have been some kind of indentation or something in the ground there that filled up with runoff coming down the side of the cliff and then partially froze over when the temperature dropped low enough."

"Well, you should really be more careful and—" Erza started.

Gray sneezed loudly and rubbed at his reddened nose, and Natsu noticed that he was actually shivering. It was almost funny since Gray didn't usually shiver in the cold, but Natsu supposed that the freezing water must be a different story.

"Oh great, you're going to catch a cold," Natsu said with a sigh.

He stepped forward and summoned up some flames so that he could dry out Gray's pants and get rid of all the excess water dripping off his friend.

"I'm an ice mage," Gray grumbled. "I'm not going to catch a cold." All the same, he didn't shy away from Natsu's fire.

The truth was that Gray  _had_ caught colds before, although Natsu could count those instances on one hand. Gray had always been defensive about it and had stubbornly insisted that he was 'absolutely, positively  _not_  sick, thank you very much, and— _shut up, you fire-breathing idiot! I'll_ show  _you sick!_ ', but that had just been a matter of injured pride. Natsu had always made sure to tease him mercilessly and rub it in as much as possible to get maximum enjoyment out of it.

But really, Natsu didn't want to see him get sick again this time. He used his magic to dry Gray off and warm him up a little, but he was getting the feeling that the ice mage might be coming down with something within the next few days. Erza stepped forward and handed Gray his shirt, and Natsu was relieved that she had thought to pick it up when he had discarded it earlier. At least it was already dry. Gray pulled it on without protest as Erza turned on Lyon and demanded that he put his shirt back on as well.

Lucy continued to apologize profusely until Gray finally managed to convince her to stop. Natsu just sighed, because they still had a good deal of mountain to climb down before they could get Gray inside and out of the freezing air. The ice mage sneezed again, and Natsu noticed that he was still trembling slightly even though he wasn't wet anymore.

"Here."

Natsu unwrapped his scarf from around his neck and wound it around Gray's instead. At least it would help keep Gray warmer until they could get back to the guild, because for once, he did not appear to be enjoying the cold. The ice mage recoiled a little, blinking at Natsu with wide, wary eyes.

Behind them, the heated debate over whether or not Lyon should have to wear his shirt died out as the participants looked over in surprise.

"I thought I told you to hang on to this," Gray said.

Natsu tried to think back to when Gray had given him back his scarf a few weeks ago. He didn't think that Gray had actually said  _anything_ about the scarf. But Gray  _had_ said something similar when he had returned Natsu's scarf to him while they were fighting Tartaros. Natsu didn't know if that was what Gray was referring to or not.

"You told me not to lose it again if it was important to me," Natsu corrected.

Gray frowned slightly. "Then why did you get rid of it?"

"What do you mean?" Lucy asked hesitantly. "Natsu would never get rid of his scarf."

Gray didn't even glance at her. He kept his dark eyes trained steadily on Natsu. The dragon slayer grimaced faintly and glanced away.

"Because I thought that I lost something even more important," he answered quietly, "so it seemed silly to keep it."

There was a moment of silence as everyone digested that, everyone besides Gray looking lost and confused. Something sparked in Lyon's eyes, and Natsu wondered if he was making the connection to the time he had found the dragon slayer in the park without his scarf.

"Well, that's stupid," Gray said after a minute. "How is that supposed to help?"

Natsu smiled ruefully. "It's not," he replied.

He hadn't been in a good place when he had made that decision, hadn't been thinking very clearly. At the time it had seemed like a fitting punishment for what he had done, but if he had lost that scarf, he would have never gotten over it. Like Gray had said, it had been a stupid thing to do.

Gray blinked at him for a few seconds and then reached up and began fussing with the scarf with one hand, trying to tug it off. "You should keep—"

Natsu reached out and clasped his hand over Gray's to make him stop. The ice mage's hand stilled.

"Keep it for now," the dragon slayer said. "At least until we can get you back into the guild where it's warm."

"But—"

"The scarf is important," Natsu interrupted, "but there are more important things. And I'd rather not watch you shiver all the way down the mountain."

He gave Gray a meaningful look and removed his hand. The ice mage stared back at him for a moment longer before dropping his own hand and nodding slightly.

"Good," Natsu said, "because I'm getting tired of all this disgusting snow and cold, and I'd like to get going."

There was a chorus of muted agreement, and the team headed back across the wide plain area and found the trail back down again. Everyone still seemed a little distracted and out of sorts from the incident with Gray's fall and Natsu's partial confession about what he had done with his scarf. Natsu was trying to figure out how to lift the mood, but Gray beat him to it.

"You're going to be making hot chocolate, right?" Gray asked suddenly, nudging Lyon with his elbow.

The older ice mage started in surprise and then frowned over at him. "Why me?" he grumbled.

"Because it's a tradition," Gray said cheerfully. His smile took on a sly cast. "Not that you're really any good at it, but I'll take what I can get."

Lyon scowled. "Just you wait. I'll make the best hot chocolate ever."

Natsu watched the brewing argument with faint amusement. Funny, but Gray's sudden decision to start a snowball fight earlier had also corresponded to a time when things had gotten tense in the group. Perhaps Gray was more observant than they gave him credit for. Natsu also didn't think that Gray had tasted hot chocolate since the void, so he wondered if that comment had been another snippet of memory.

Whatever the case, the banter somehow shifted to Lyon, Lucy, and Erza, with Happy pitching in now and then. Gray had somehow skillfully extracted himself from the conversation he had started so that he could drop back a few paces to walk beside Natsu. They walked in companionable silence, content to remain quiet and soak in their friends' laughter and teasing.

They had just reached the bottom of the mountain when Gray tugged at the scarf to adjust it, and Natsu glanced over. Their eyes met and Gray smiled faintly.

"Thank you, Natsu," he said quietly, before speeding up to harass Lyon about the hot chocolate again.

Natsu stared after him, a smile tugging at his lips. It was nice to hear Gray say his name again after so long. He didn't get to hear it often anymore. Although, to be honest, he was still partial to 'flame brain', however odd it might seem to the others.

"What are you so happy about?" Happy asked, dropping back to hover in the air by his friend.

Natsu's smile widened a bit. "Important things, Happy. Important things."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this is kind of cliché. No, I do not care. Still, it's good to show progress and I actually used a couple things to set up things later, or at least made references to them. Also, I have no regrets, if only because the bit with the scarf just needed to happen. And I couldn't resist the mental image of Gray running around with snowballs like a kid, ha ha.


	21. Ch 20-Gray shows Natsu the notebook

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a couple sort of AUish, or at least non-canon, things here, but they serve a purpose and there shouldn't be anything too jarring.

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**Chapter 20**

_(In which Gray finally shows Natsu the elusive notebook.)_

* * *

As it turned out, Gray did in fact catch a cold. And despite Natsu's earlier good intentions, he ended up teasing the ice mage mercilessly anyway. Gray seemed just as reluctant to admit to being sick as he had been before the void, so despite his sneezing and coughing and general drowsiness, he continued to insist that he was just fine, thank you very much. He quickly started getting irritated with the constant ribbing Natsu and Lyon were giving him, and one day when Natsu wasn't paying attention, the dragon slayer found himself with a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. It hadn't been enough to make him sick of course, but it seemed to give Gray great satisfaction. Natsu had thought that perhaps he should warn Lyon, but had decided that it would be a lot more fun to see Gray get him too. Sure enough, Lyon had gotten the same treatment as Natsu, and it had seemed to put Gray in a much more cheerful mood.

Shortly after Gray's cold had faded a few days later, Lyon departed somewhat reluctantly, saying that he was going to visit Lamia Scale for a couple days and then come straight back. Natsu supposed it must be difficult for him, being away from his guild for so long. He also doubted that Lyon would stay away for very long, because he was just as overprotective of Gray as Natsu himself and didn't want to miss out on any of Gray's progress.

Still, Natsu resolved to enjoy the break from Lyon. Sure he got along with the older ice mage better now and actually enjoyed having him around at times, but he had also been stuck living with him for a few weeks now and it was all too easy to get irritated with roommates. It wasn't that Lyon had done anything wrong, really, just that Natsu was glad to have his house to himself—and Happy—for a few days.

He and Happy also started backing off of Gray a little, letting the ice mage walk to and from the guild on his own in the mornings and evenings. They would still occasionally walk with him for old time's sake, but Natsu figured that part of letting Gray be independent was trusting him to get back and forth on his own. Of course, Natsu still made sure that the landlady—whose name he  _still_ didn't know—was keeping tabs on Gray. She made sure that he arrived back at his apartment safely every night, and it helped Natsu sleep a little easier.

Gray had remained in pretty good spirits the whole time, although he seemed a little subdued on the day Lyon returned. Natsu knew that it wasn't actually because of Lyon's reappearance because Gray had been pretty quiet since the moment he walked into the guild that morning and Lyon hadn't arrived until the afternoon, but he didn't know the actual cause. He had asked Gray if he was doing alright, and the ice mage had just smiled and nodded. Gray had seemed to revert back to his normal good mood after that, but he remained quieter than usual and seemed a little distracted. Natsu didn't worry too much since Gray didn't really seem upset by anything and his moods did still fluctuate sometimes. No one else seemed to even notice, so although he was initially curious, he quickly dismissed it once Lyon showed back up.

"Was it nice seeing all your guildmates again?" Lucy asked nicely when Lyon walked in unannounced that afternoon.

"Oh yeah," Lyon said cheerfully. Then he smirked a little, and Natsu knew that he was more in the mood to make fun of people. And his favorite target was usually Natsu, and sometimes Gray if the younger mage seemed to be in a joking mood. "It was really nice to be able to stay in an apartment where I could actually see the floor."

Natsu scowled, although he wasn't really angry. "You're always welcome to find a hotel to stay at," he offered.

Lyon waved him off. "Oh no, I hate staying in hotels. But not being able to find anything is going to take some getting used to again." He glanced over at Lucy, Erza, and Gray, and arched an eyebrow. "Have you seen the state of his kitchen cabinets? It's amazing that I didn't starve when I was there on my own. It really is impossible to find anything."

Natsu rolled his eyes. "What is everyone's problem with the kitchen cabinets?" he asked no one in particular.

"I don't know," Happy said, obviously not seeing why it was an issue.

"I  _have_  seen them, actually," Gray volunteered.

Natsu looked to him as a possible ally. "They aren't that bad, right?"

Gray threw him a disbelieving look and snorted. "They're horrendous," he said dryly. "You found a dirty sock in them."

"That was  _one_ time…" Natsu protested, before trailing off. He smiled sheepishly. In all honesty, it wasn't the first time and likely wouldn't be the last. And far stranger things had turned up in those cabinets before. "Okay, fine—they're a little messy. But we've kept them that way for years, and Happy and I have done just fine."

"Yeah, well you'd think that you'd at least bother to fix them up a little if you knew that you'd be having guests," Lyon remarked.

"Oh, it's worse than that," Gray muttered, shooting Natsu a baleful look. "He went and did the same thing to my cabinets too."

"In all fairness, they never got anywhere near as bad as mine," Natsu said reasonably.

Gray did not seem mollified in the slightest. He just rolled his eyes.

"They were organized by the time I moved in," Happy interjected.

"Only because I fixed them," Gray replied, scowling slightly. "Between those and the rest of the mess he made, it took me hours to clean up."

Natsu frowned thoughtfully. Gray's manic cleaning spree had been the morning after the fiasco with Rufus and Meredy. It had occurred to him then that it must have taken Gray a while to do all that cleaning, but it hadn't bothered him much at the time. But Natsu hadn't woken up all that late, so if Gray had been cleaning for hours already by that point…Natsu wondered just how early Gray had gotten up. Then he shook his head and shrugged it off. It was odd, but probably not important.

"It's not my fault that you're an obsessive neat freak," he told Gray matter-of-factly.

The ice mage's eyes narrowed slightly. "It's not my fault that you're a slob," he shot back.

Natsu grinned, and the corners of Gray's lips twitched upwards in an answering half-smile.

"It's amazing that you two didn't kill each other," Erza said with a sigh.

Natsu shrugged. "It wasn't so bad before he decided to get obsessed with cleaning," he answered. "And afterwards…Well, I tried to be kind of neater 'cause he'd give me dirty looks if I didn't wash my dishes or I left my clothes on the floor or whatever."

"Didn't stop you from doing it anyway," Gray said dryly. "I still had to clean up after you all the time."

Lucy made a tsking sound and shook her head in light disapproval. "How rude, Natsu," she told the dragon slayer, half teasing. "You shouldn't make a mess in someone else's house when you're a guest."

Natsu threw his hands up in the air. "You guys don't get it," he protested. "When he says that he cleaned up after me, he doesn't only mean that he did my dishes or whatever. He's way more obsessive than that. All of the chairs have to be pushed in when you leave the table, everything that's out has to be lined up neatly, and nothing can even be crooked.

"You should see his bookshelves. Every book spine has to be exactly even with all the others. If one sticks out so much as a centimeter, he has to push it back in to the  _exact_ level of the other books. He has certain angles that he keeps picture frames at and if you nudge them at all, he has to correct them back to that exact angle. Yeah, his cleaning is obsessive, but even more than that, everything has an exact place that it has to be in. His straightening and organizing is ridiculous. It's amazing he doesn't spend all day doing it."

The others blinked at him for a moment and then studied Gray carefully. For his part, the younger ice mage just shrugged it off, although he was looking a little distracted again.

"It doesn't usually take as much effort as you think," he said absently. "When it's just me, not much ever gets out of place to begin with so I don't have to keep straightening everything out."

Which, if you asked Natsu, was beside the point. The compulsive need to have everything exactly right still seemed strange to him. As someone who was perfectly happy living in a messy house where nothing really had a specific place, Natsu couldn't really understand it.

"Was he always that obsessive about it?" Lucy asked pensively.

"I don't know," Natsu said with a shrug. "I didn't spend a whole lot of time at his apartment before all this, but I do know that it was always spotless and super neat. It always made me want to break something or knock some stuff over, because something that clean is asking to be messed up."

Lucy shook her head in amused exasperation at Natsu's response, but Lyon looked thoughtful.

"When he was a kid, he was always really neat too," he mused, a nostalgic look flitting over his face as he contemplated his childhood. "I always thought it was kind of strange because really, how many young boys are that neat? He didn't have a problem making a mess when we were fighting or something, but sometimes I'd see him cleaning up afterward, even if Ur didn't tell him to."

"I wonder why he's so insistent on cleanliness and order," Erza said, her eyes sparkling with faint curiosity.

"My first thought would be to say that it was a side effect from learning molding magic since it teaches you how to be very precise and neat, and that might carry over into other areas," Lyon said with a shrug. "And maybe that's part of it because his need to keep things organized intensified while he was training, but he had already picked up some of it by the time he first arrived. My theory was that maybe it was a form of control. Like, a lot of bad stuff happened to him that he couldn't control as a kid and he probably felt like he didn't have any means of controlling his life, so maybe he tried to control his surroundings instead."

Natsu stared at him. That was a much more negative explanation than he wanted to think about. Yeah, he knew that Gray had had a pretty messed up childhood, but still.

"Wow, look at you psychoanalyzing him," Natsu told Lyon, keeping his tone upbeat. "Super deep explanation and everything. I always thought that he did it to annoy me."

Lucy snorted in amusement. "Maybe he's just secretly OCD or something," she suggested.

"Or maybe after having to be around all the chaos of the guild all day, he finds it more relaxing to go home to a neat apartment," Erza said dryly. "Let him clean if he wants to."

Lucy laughed and turned to Gray. "Well? Who's right, Gray?" she asked him.

Natsu hadn't really noticed that Gray had gotten even quieter as they talked. The ice mage had silently extracted himself from the conversation and was now staring blankly at the table in front of him with slightly narrowed eyes. It wasn't quite the same look he got when he was getting uncomfortable because the others were discussing his past, but there was something unreadable and quietly intense in his eyes. It occurred to Natsu that although their questions about Gray's obsessive neatness were directed towards a habit he had recovered since the void, the answer they were looking for might be tied to the past. Even if Gray had the impulse to keep things straightened out, he might not know why.

The conversation had been mostly teasing and joking up to this point, but Natsu realized that it might be a more serious matter to Gray. Really, they should have known better, but now they had gone and brought up the past and made him uncomfortable. Natsu was about to suggest that they change the topic, but Gray finally spoke up.

"All of you," he said flatly. "And none of you."

That gave Natsu pause, because it hadn't been the answer he was anticipating. He had been expecting another 'I don't know' or maybe a comment to throw them off topic. This was unexpected because it sounded like Gray might actually know the answer to their question.

"Gray?" Natsu asked hesitantly, unsure of how to proceed.

The ice mage didn't look at them, but his eyes narrowed even further and Natsu noticed that his hands had clenched into fists in his lap.

"Really, kids don't start off wanting things to stay neat," Gray said expressionlessly. Natsu got the feeling that he was only half talking to them. "Kids like to make messes; they hate being told to clean things up. Why would I be any different?"

He snorted derisively, his unfocused gaze still resting blankly on the tabletop. The others began to shift uncomfortably, finally sensing that something wasn't quite right here.

"Oh no, I was a messy kid alright," he said darkly. "My mom used to always get on my case about it. It was always 'go clean your room' or 'pick up your toys' or 'stop making messes everywhere'. I hated cleaning, I hated being told what to do, sometimes I thought I hated my mom when she kept nagging me. Oh, we'd fight over it sometimes.

"And you know, we fought about it again just before that damn demon showed up. Only a few hours before, really, because I hadn't cleaned my room when she told me to, so there was some yelling and I was an ungrateful brat and got sent to my room to sulk and clean. And then the demon came out of nowhere, and she was dead. She and my dad died trying to protect me. In the end she would have known that I was sorry and I loved her, I think, but I never got to say those words."

Natsu sucked in a breath, his eyes widening. Gray shouldn't know this. This wasn't one of those brief snatches of memory that would occasionally bleed through. This was more than an offhand comment or vague knowledge of an event that shouldn't be remembered. It might be the most detailed thing Gray had remembered so far, and Natsu wished that it had been a happier memory rather than this terribly sad one.

"It seems silly to an adult, but to a child it seemed like a reasonable thing, to clean up like his mother would have wanted," Gray continued, his lips tightening and his dark eyes glazing over even more. "She died for me, so the  _least_  I could do was keep my room clean like she wanted, right? So that's how it started, really. The other stuff came after—the need for control, the increased emphasis on precision and neatness that came from learning molding, the desire for a clean space to call my own. It all came together to feed into an obsessive impulse, a need for order that I couldn't really control.

"And now it's even worse, because my head is such a mess and I can't organize any of it and it's driving me insane, so I organize other things instead. Great consolation prize, huh? 'Oh, you can't figure out how to sort out your own memories? Well here, organize some cabinets instead and maybe it'll make you feel better.' But really, why does it matter so much? Keeping things clean isn't hurting anyone. I don't see why it's such a big deal."

Gray finally seemed to shake himself out of his daze, and looked up to see everyone staring at him with shocked and horrified expressions. Natsu half-expected him to get that lost, uncomfortable look he usually got after remembering something, but instead his gaze seemed to take on a frustrated cast and turn inward again. Gray made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat and clasped his hands on either side of his head, shaking his head sharply a few times as if he was trying to remember—or forget.

Then he let his hands drop to his sides, glanced at the clock on the wall, and stood up. He studied the others tiredly. "I think I'm going to go home early today," he said quietly.

Lyon opened his mouth to say something, but Gray just shook his head slightly and headed out of the guild, leaving a group of stunned mages in his wake. As he disappeared from sight, the others all looked at each other.

"What the hell was that?" Lyon asked slowly, still in shock.

"It's not like the other things he's remembered," Erza mused, not looking any less disturbed.

"That's so sad," Lucy breathed, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.

Lyon let out a breath and looked away, his eyes narrowing slightly. "I never knew that story," he said. "I don't think that anyone did. I wish I had known."

Natsu stood up, catching everyone's attention.

"Natsu?" Happy asked hesitantly.

"I'll go talk to him," the dragon slayer said, his eyes still fixed on the now-empty doorway.

He thought that there might have been a few worried protests and concerned questions, but he paid them no mind. He followed after Gray, putting his nose to good use as he tracked down his friend. He didn't know what he expected to accomplish by going after Gray, but it wasn't like he could just pretend that this never happened. And to be honest, this whole incident had raised some questions in his mind, questions that he wanted answered.

Gray hadn't gotten far, and Natsu caught up to him quickly. The ice mage noticed his approach and eyed him warily, but that strange mix of frustration and sadness still hung about him rather than the normal air of confusion and defensiveness that usually accompanied the memories.

"Do you know more than you're letting on?" Natsu asked bluntly as soon as he reached Gray's side.

Gray paused for a moment and studied him. Worrying his lip absentmindedly, he seemed to wage an internal debate. Then he took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he came to a decision.

"I want to show you something," he said finally.

Then he turned and started walking away again, back down the street towards his apartment, Natsu trailing along beside him. The dragon slayer was dying of curiosity and he desperately wanted to ask Gray what he was talking about, but he held his tongue. He had the feeling that he'd get his answers soon enough if he was patient.

So he stayed silent as they walked back to the apartment. The silence lasted up until they finally reached Gray's doorstep and the ice mage began digging through his pockets as he looked for the key. He frowned slightly when it wasn't in the pocket he expected it to be in, and began searching through his other pockets.

"Where could it possibly have gone?" he muttered to himself, scowling slightly.

Natsu watched him for a moment and then snorted softly, despite the seriousness of the present situation. "Honestly, I don't know how you ever managed to get into your apartment. Given how often you stripped, it's amazing that you could ever find your key," he remarked.

Gray didn't look up, still too absorbed in his search. "That's why I always kept a spare in the gap behind the loose brick," he said distractedly.

Natsu stared at him. After a second, Gray seemed to realize what he had just said and froze. He slowly looked up, and he and Natsu locked eyes for a moment. Then both their gazes slid sideways, to the brick wall on the side of the apartment.

Gray didn't move for a second, but then he took a few quick steps forward. Immediately zeroing in on one brick in particular, his pale fingers expertly hooked around its edges and tugged it out of place with practiced ease. The brick slid out of the wall with a little coaxing, revealing a crumbling gap behind it. A small, silver key shimmered faintly in the shadows, and Gray snatched it up, unceremoniously jamming the brick back into place as he turned back to the door and hurriedly scrabbled at the lock with an air of urgency. The door opened and Gray stumbled into the apartment, Natsu close on his heels.

The ice mage dropped the key on a side table near the door and hurried into the living room, not even sparing a glance to see what Natsu was doing. His inexplicable sense of urgency puzzled Natsu, but the dragon slayer just closed the door and followed Gray to the next room, watching him in bewildered silence.

Gray had immediately gone to the desk. Jerking open one of the drawers, he reached inside and pulled out a book. Natsu's eyes widened slightly as he recognized that notebook again. He hadn't seen it in a few weeks so he had almost forgotten about it, but it looked like Gray still kept it around after all. Gray sat down at the desk and opened the notebook, frantically flipping through the pages with one hand and absently scrabbling around on the desk for a pen with the other. His fingers closed around a pen and he finally opened to the page he wanted.

Natsu drifted closer, peering over Gray's shoulder curiously as the ice mage began frantically scribbling in the notebook, his normally neat script a little messier than usual in his haste to write.

_'Spare key behind loose brick.'_

_'Mother dead—demon. Connection to impulse to clean. Angry to sad. Guilt?'_

Natsu let out a breath slowly. The pen paused and Gray glanced up at the dragon slayer.

"Why are you writing it?" Natsu asked. "Is this the stuff you've been writing in here?"

Gray hesitated a moment and then stood up from the desk. Snatching up the notebook and pen, he headed over to sit down on the couch, motioning for Natsu to follow. The dragon slayer did so, sitting down beside Gray and keeping his eyes trained on the notebook.

"I have to write them down, you see," Gray said finally. Natsu tore his eyes away from his friend's scrawl so that he could meet the ice mage's eyes. Gray looked a little uncomfortable, but mostly frustrated. "Those brief snatches of memory, they start to fade. I can only hold on to them for a second and then they're gone again. Sometimes it disappears completely. Sometimes I can hang on to the emotion behind it but I forget the details, and sometimes I remember the facts but all the feelings fade away and I can't connect to them anymore. Mostly I can remember some of the facts and knowledge, but I lose the memory itself, until all I'm left with is a collection of bare facts that I know are true but don't really  _remember_.

"So I write down what I remember, the details and the emotions. I thought that maybe if I kept them written here I would be able to remember better, because I can go back and reread them. But it doesn't usually help, because I can read them over and over again but I still can't connect to them. I can see the words, but I can't feel the emotions, can't really remember the details. I know that everything here is true, but I can't feel it. I read over it and it means nothing to me, even though it meant something in the moment I wrote it down."

Gray let out a frustrated breath, his eyes flashing with irritation. "Something is missing. Something connects everything together, but I haven't been able to find it yet," he muttered. "I keep looking, but I can't find it. Right now everything is in pieces, and I can't make sense of them because I don't know what it is that links them together. If I can find what's missing, if I can find what it is that makes all the pieces fit together, then maybe I can remember something. Maybe all of these pieces will make sense."

Natsu stared at Gray with wide eyes. All these months, he had suspected that Gray tried to forget all the memory flashes as quickly as they came because of how uncomfortable they made him. Gray hadn't shown any interest in remembering. He hadn't told them that he was trying to remember, hadn't shown any inclination to talk about the past or try to connect to it, but that desperate frustration written all over his face told Natsu that it bothered Gray more than he had let on. Gray had always looked so uncomfortable and unhappy whenever he seemed to remember anything, which was why everyone tried not to make a big deal out of it. But he  _hadn't_ just gone and tried to push it all out of his mind like Natsu had worried that he did.

Natsu frowned a little. If Gray wanted to remember—and something in the ice mage's eyes told the dragon slayer that he did—then why did he always seem so upset whenever he remembered anything? Why did he always get so defensive and withdrawn? The discomfort had made sense when Natsu had thought that Gray just didn't like to be reminded of a past he didn't remember, a past that he only half believed had even existed at all, but if Gray  _wanted_  to remember…

"Why didn't you just tell us?" Natsu asked. "We could have tried to help. We thought that you didn't want to remember because of how uncomfortable you'd get and how much you'd shut down. We've been waiting for you to be ready to try remembering, but you've already been doing it? Why do you always seem so upset when you remember something then?"

Gray looked away, his eyes narrowing slightly and his fingers tightening around the notebook. "The memory flashes made me uncomfortable at first, and they still do sometimes, but that's not the only reason. It's…It's how you all react that's so bad."

Natsu frowned in confusion. "What? What are we doing wrong?" he asked.

He had thought that they were always very supportive when Gray would say or do something subconsciously. They had always been excited about it, hoping that it was some kind of breakthrough or at least progress. Well, eventually they had started trying to mask their reactions to reduce Gray's discomfort, but they had thought that would help.

Gray just shook his head fitfully. "You didn't do anything wrong," he said with a sigh. "But every time I do something or say something that I shouldn't know, you all look so damn  _hopeful_. It makes you think that I'm getting better, that maybe my memory is improving, that maybe I'll go back to the way I was. But I'm  _not_. I don't like seeing you all get so excited over nothing. It will only hurt more in the end.

"So I hide it. You all don't even know about most of things I remember, only the ones that make me do or say something without thinking. I remember much more than you think I do, but also much less. The flashes have been getting more and more common, but I can't hang on to any of them. I write them down but they mean nothing to me. I usually have to write things down right away while I can still almost connect to them, but you were getting suspicious about the notebook, so I stopped bringing it with me. There wasn't much I could do when you still lived here, but now that you're gone I can just write in it once you leave."

That was a very  _Gray_ line of reasoning. The old Gray could be very open about some things, but if he thought that something might hurt his friends, he would hide it to the bitter end. Natsu almost understood it, but he felt like he was still missing something here.

"Hope is good," he said. "We could always use a little, especially when we start getting discouraged about how things are going. I get the whole not wanting to get our hopes up thing, but why are you really so insistent about hiding this from us?"

Gray bit his lip and his eyes narrowed further as he stared at the floor. "Because when you think I remember something…When you look at me, you see him."

Natsu blinked in bewilderment, not understanding. "Who?"

Gray finally looked back up at Natsu with sad eyes. "Gray," he said dully.

Natsu sucked in a sharp breath and flinched back in surprise. "What do you mean?" he demanded. "You  _are_ Gray."

The ice mage's gaze wandered off to the side.

"I told you that I wasn't him," he said quietly. "I don't know him. I don't feel like him. His memories are alien to me. The things I remember about his life don't feel like they happened to me, at least not after those first few moments when I can almost connect to them. I know you want him back and I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but I can't be him."

A strangled sound choked its way out of Natsu's throat as the dragon slayer stared at his friend in horrified disbelief. He should have seen this coming, really. This post-void Gray had always made it clear that he was someone different from the Gray they had once known, but Natsu had hoped that with all the flashes of memory, that belief would have finally started to shift.

Gray looked back at him, and his eyes were tired and sad. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I tried, really, but it doesn't work. I don't think this is something I can fix."

Natsu leaned forward and grasped one of Gray's hands in his own. The ice mage blinked down at their joined hands warily, but didn't pull away.

"Maybe you can't fix it on your own, but let us try to help you," Natsu said earnestly. Gray met his eyes again, though his expression remained unreadable. "You have no idea how impossible it seemed just getting you back from the void in the first place. We all thought that you had died, and you didn't even realize that you existed at all. It should have been impossible, what we did, but you're here now, aren't you?

"So don't give up just because things are getting tough again. We already beat impossible odds once. Let us at least try to do it again. And if it doesn't work out…" Natsu bit his lip. "We'll still be here for you. Not only because of who you were, but because of who you are now too. Yes, we want you back the way you were before, but we also like you for who you are right now. You don't have to be sorry for who you've become."

Gray swallowed and looked away, a faint sheen of unshed tears shimmering in his dark eyes. Natsu felt his heart twist.

"You want to remember, right?" the dragon slayer asked, his voice lilting uncertainly. It was still sometimes difficult to figure out exactly what was going on in Gray's head these days. "You said that you're trying to remember, even if you aren't sure that it can be done?"

Gray hesitated a moment and then nodded slightly. "Yeah."

"Then let me at least try to help," Natsu pleaded. "All I'm asking is that you give me a chance."

The ice mage stared at Natsu indecisively for a moment before biting his lip again and nodding once more. "Okay."

Natsu let out a sigh of relief. Maybe they would actually be able to make some progress after all.

"So," he said, eager to get down to business, "when did you start all this?"

Gray pursed his lips and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Writing in the notebook?" He sighed. "It was after what happened that time you kept trying to show me memories and make me feel things. The time you pushed me too far and then ran away."

Natsu automatically winced at the reminder, but Gray didn't seem angry.

"It did something to my head," Gray concluded thoughtfully. "I don't know. It made me feel things, or at least helped me figure out how to understand what I was feeling. And it's what made me start getting memory flashes too."

Pushing aside the guilt of that experience, Natsu made himself consider it objectively. Yes, he had noticed that that was a major turning point. Gray had started making progress in leaps and bounds after that, starting as early as the next day. Come to think of it, Gray's manic cleaning spree had been the day after. Natsu could still remember waking up to find Gray gone and panicking that the ice mage had decided to leave him after all. In fact, Gray had just gotten up early and cleaned the entire apartment.

Natsu frowned a little as he put the pieces together. Gray had been interested in writing before that point, but he had only copied things out of job requests or books. That day, the morning Gray's cleaning obsession returned, was the first time Natsu had noticed him writing in the notebook while not copying anything. He still remembered how curious he had been about it since he had never seen Gray do that before.

"That…actually makes sense," the dragon slayer mused slowly.

"I know it does," Gray muttered. "That's why I started being more careful about the notebook. I figured you'd make the connection eventually."

Natsu felt that there were a lot of ways to respond to that, but he shifted his attention to the notebook instead. "Can I see it?" he asked.

Gray hesitated, but then flipped back to the first page and reluctantly handed the notebook over to Natsu. The dragon slayer peered down at the words with a frown.

_'He needed to tell her something, this blue-haired girl._

_But as he was opening his mouth, he saw one of those beasts rise up behind her—one of those dragon spawn creatures they had been fighting._

_And it was going to shoot her while she wasn't looking,_

_so without thinking,_

_he pushed her out of the way._

_He felt the shot go straight through his chest._

_Looking down, he could see the gaping hole there._

_He blinked at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, watching the_

_blood_

_pour_

_down._

_And then there was the screaming—that blue-haired girl and another girl and a man. He looked up to tell them that_

_it was okay,_

_but then more dragonlings appeared, and_

_he could feel the searing pain as they shot him full of holes until_

_there was nothing left of him._

_It was just pain and blood and screaming._

_And then there was_

_one_

_final_

_shot_

_to his head, and everything went_

_blessedly dark.'_

He recoiled in surprise. "What is this?" he breathed, staring at it wide-eyed.

He recognized the feeling behind the words, of course. This was the almost-memory of Gray's death, the one the curse had twisted and warped and used against them. Natsu expected Gray to remember it since he had relived it in the void, but it was still a shock to see it here. And there was something fundamentally disturbing about it. Something about how that strange, fragmented quality of the memory had been so perfectly captured in a handful of scrawled words. Something about how it was so muted and washed out and impersonal, but deeply painful and close to home at the same time. Something about how it was written in the third person.

"The void memory," Gray said matter-of-factly. "You know that."

"Why is it here?" Natsu asked stupidly.

"I thought it might help take the edge off the nightmares if I wrote it down," Gray said with a shrug.

Natsu looked over at him sharply. "What nightmares?" he demanded.

Gray sighed softly. "I know that you think the curse disappeared when you pulled me back from the void, but it's not completely gone."

A panicked, nauseous feeling settled in Natsu's stomach. "What?" he rasped, his throat suddenly too dry to form words properly.

"Sometimes I can feel it gnawing at the edges of my mind," Gray said, his voice subdued as he stared at his words blankly. "Nothing as bad as it must have been, nothing that will drag me back to the void or rip away the new memories I've made, but a weak residue of sorts. I think that it's part of the reason I can't hang on to the memory flashes, because it pulls them away again before I can figure out what connects them all.

"And I…" He grimaced. "Maybe I'm not being completely truthful. Some days it's worse than others. Sometimes it talks to me and says things. Not necessarily in words, although sometimes it's strong enough to whisper things, but in feelings and half-formed ideas. I don't know. It's hard to explain. It's just that some days…some days it's really loud."

Natsu didn't want to think about that. He didn't want to think that that damn curse might still be lurking somewhere in Gray's mind, preventing his friend from recovering his memories. It might make a kind of sense, but Natsu had thought that it was gone, that it had been left behind in the void. He didn't want to think that it might be back, that it might never have quite left in the first place. Then something in Gray's words finally registered in Natsu's brain and his eyes widened in horror.

"That time when you completely broke down in the middle of the guild, when you went to find Erza afterwards, you kept saying that it was 'loud'," the dragon slayer said slowly, his hands curling instinctively into helpless fists. "I thought that you just meant that you were getting overwhelmed, but…"

Gray half nodded, half shrugged, still not looking at Natsu. "I told you that it wasn't really your fault," he murmured. "I just…The curse was really loud that day, and when it's strong it just makes everything worse and it's harder for me to cope with things. It helps when you or someone else just talks because it gives me something else to focus on and helps drown out the curse."

"That night when you woke up and we walked around the city and you asked me to talk…?"

"Yeah." Gray pursed his lips. "It was loud then too."

"Is that what woke you up?"

Gray shrugged. "Yes and no. When the curse is strong, I sometimes dream of the void memory. It doesn't always bother me, but sometimes it wakes me up."

"Why didn't you just tell me?" Natsu asked dully.

Gray tilted his head to give Natsu a faintly curious look. "Didn't I tell you that the reason I liked to sleep so much was because it was the closest thing to the void?"

The dragon slayer let his breath out in a hiss, his eyes widening. Yes, Gray had said that, but Natsu had assumed the reason sleep was like the void was because it was more unconscious, more fragmented, something between existence and nonexistence. He hadn't thought that part of the reason might be because Gray still experienced the same almost-memory he had kept in the void.

"How long has this been going on?" he demanded.

"Since the beginning, really," Gray replied with another shrug. "Most of the time it's not that bad. If it gets bad then that's usually when I just get up early, like that time I rewrote the potion labels before you got up, or when I spent the morning and half the night cleaning the apartment."

Natsu let out a breath. Funny, he had thought that Gray was making progress when the ice mage got up early. He hadn't thought that it was because Gray had been having nightmares and didn't want to go back to sleep.

He looked back down at the page and studied it again. "Why did you write it in the third person like that?" he asked quietly.

Gray shifted uncomfortably. "Because it's something that happened to Gray," he said, glancing away. "It's his memory, his nightmare. It doesn't really feel like mine."

Natsu's fingers tightened involuntarily, wrinkling the page. He forced them to relax again.

"I'm sorry," Gray said somberly.

That actually made Natsu feel even worse, because he knew that Gray only apologized when he meant it now, and he really shouldn't have to be sorry for something like this.

"It's okay," Natsu replied tightly, even though it really wasn't. "Let's just…Let's just keep looking at what's here."

Gray nodded wordlessly, and Natsu flipped the page. The dragon slayer blinked at it uncomprehendingly for a moment and then turned it so that he was looking at it landscape style.

"This…is your kitchen?" he asked as he peered at the sketch.

It looked almost like a blueprint, with all the cabinets and drawers marked off as squares and rectangles. There were written labels like 'bacon pan', 'silverware', and 'glasses' scattered around. Natsu bet that if he compared this sketch to Gray's actual kitchen, the labels would correspond to how the ice mage had organized everything.

"Um, yeah," Gray said, sounding a little embarrassed. Natsu glanced over at him, and the ice mage smiled self-deprecatingly. "Well, you know, one of the first things I remembered that day was where everything went. I mean, it was more of a feeling really, but once I put everything back in place I sketched it out in case I forgot again."

Natsu nodded slowly. He didn't think it was that silly, actually. Instead of pressing the point, he slowly flipped through the notebook, taking in all of the things Gray had written there. Natsu recognized some of them as things that Gray had said or done that he shouldn't have known. Apparently the ice mage had written them all down afterwards. Come to think of it, Natsu realized that Gray had often been writing in the notebook shortly after he had gotten those flashes of memory. The dragon slayer felt kind of stupid for not making the connection.

There would be time enough for worrying about that later though. For now, he just turned the pages, his eyes devouring the words and occasional sketches.

_'Healer shouldn't be so nice. Weird.'_

_'Losing clothing is normal?'_

_'Landlady=Obaa-san. Has three grandchildren?'_

_'Don't cry, Erza. Riverbank.'_

_'The scarf is important—dragon? Why did he throw it out?'_

_'Owl man—Fukuro. Tower of Heaven. Ate Natsu? Froze flames.'_

_'Always two-handed molding. One-handed molding is unbalanced.'_

_'Demon, blood, death. Parents? She turned into ice. Why would she turn into ice?'_

_'Always liked the snow.'_

The list went on and on. Some entries had more detail than others. Some were just bare facts or questions, while other were short paragraphs fully describing a specific memory. Some of them were things Natsu recognized, and some were not.

_'He's young, a child even if he maybe doesn't feel like one anymore. Sad that day. Guilty? Something's wrong, but he doesn't want to be sad anymore. Better to be angry—it hurts less. He's really angry at himself, but it's so much easier to look for reasons to be angry at everything—everyone—else instead. But it still hurts, and he needs to hurt on the outside the same way he hurts on the inside. A distraction? A punishment? He isn't sure._

_Easiest way is to find Natsu and start a fight. Today he lets Natsu win because he needs to feel the loss, maybe because he deserves it. But he puts up a fight first because he needs the pain of the punches and kicks, because they hurt less than the heartache. He realizes that it isn't fair. He's basically using Natsu now, goading the dragon slayer into hurting him because he's afraid that if he does it himself, he'll never be able to stop. All the anger he made himself feel for Natsu is fading now, turning inwards because that's where it belonged all along. He wants to apologize, even opens his mouth to say it, but the words stick in his throat and he just limps away instead. He tells himself that this is the last time this will happen, that he'll be nicer to Natsu and all the others and won't try to goad them into helping him punish himself anymore, but he knows that it's a lie and he hates himself for it.'_

And, scribbled hastily underneath:  _'That can't possibly be healthy. What a screwed up kid.'_

Natsu stared at the words blankly, trying to connect them to the Gray he had known as a child. He read the description again, and then once more for good measure, but it still made him feel just as sick.

"He wasn't a very happy person, was he?" Gray mused, eyeing his scrawl.

"I…" Natsu's throat closed up and he had to swallow hard and cough before he could continue speaking. "I thought you were. I mean, a lot of really terrible things happened to you as a kid and I know you weren't always happy because you thought about your past a lot, but I thought…I thought that maybe you were starting to work past some of it, that maybe you were happier now."

"He was, I think," Gray replied, wincing at the pain in Natsu's voice. "Happier, I mean. It's still hard to really connect to all of this because the actual memories are gone now, but…Well, the memories I get from his childhood are a lot sadder. He seemed pretty messed up—really guilty and sad and angry all the time. This one here is from that time, back when he was younger, probably when all the hurt was still really raw for him.

"Most of the later memories aren't as bad. I mean, they're not all super happy, like maybe he wasn't as happy as he wanted you all to believe, but they mostly get better. There are more positive ones. I think he must have at least started moving on eventually. And I get the feeling that you guys made him happy."

"I hope so," Natsu whispered. "You always helped make us happy too. Still do, I suppose."

Gray gave him a skeptical look. "You don't have to spare my feelings. Trust me, I can see all the pain and unhappiness you all feel when I start screwing things up."

Natsu winced, wondering if this once again went back to all those times Gray had asked about whether or not he made the others unhappy. He'd asked it about Lyon once, and about Natsu that time when they'd walked the city at night. He might not have come out and asked in as many words since then, but Natsu had gotten the feeling that it had been running through his mind back when he had had his breakdown in the guild and seemed to feel really bad about it afterwards. Maybe it was linked to the fact that Gray didn't think he could get his memories back and seemed to be convinced that the others would never be happy unless he managed it. That might have a kernel of truth to it, but it was still a gross oversimplification.

"It might not always be easy on us, it might hurt sometimes when you can't remember or you say certain things, but…" Natsu shook his head. "Then you'll smile or lob a snowball at us or call me 'flame brain', and it will all be worth it. It reminds us of why we care so damn much, and yeah, it makes us happy. It makes us happy to see you happy too."

Gray swallowed and looked away. "Funny how that works, isn't it?" he asked after a moment. "It's like it's contagious."

"Sure," Natsu replied. "That's how it is with friends."

Gray didn't answer for several long seconds, pursing his lips and grimacing faintly, although Natsu wasn't sure why. "Keep going," he said finally.

Natsu hesitated, but then flipped to the next page. Seeing what was printed there, he arched an eyebrow.

"Oh," Gray said, peering down. "You got to the people."

Natsu frowned at him slightly before glancing back at the words on the page. 'Lyon' was scrawled across the top, followed by 'screamer' in parenthesis. The rest of the page was filled with random tidbits of information about the older ice mage.

_'Ice molding magic.'_

_'Overprotective. Seems sad. Scared?'_

_'Knew him from childhood. Learned magic together?'_

_'Really annoying, but also…Very close?'_

_'Is still using two-handed molding again—good.'_

_'Makes terrible hot chocolate.'_

_'Skill at snowball fighting has deteriorated.'_

Natsu's eyes silently darted back and forth across the page. Gray had written several dozen statements about Lyon, all seemingly random and disconnected. It was a little odd to see a person broken down into all these fragmented pieces.

He turned the page and saw Erza's name, along with a whole host of random facts about her as well. He looked back over at Gray. "You have a page for everyone?" he asked curiously.

Gray nodded. Reaching out, he flipped through a couple pages and paused on the one that said  _'Natsu (the Voice)'_  at the top. Natsu smirked a little. Apparently Gray had already figured out what he was really interested in. The dragon slayer skimmed over the page, his eyebrows rising fractionally as he read.

_'Fire magic. Dragon slayer.'_

_'Never shuts the hell up.'_

_'Bossy, loud, always so damn hyper, overprotective.'_

_'Rival? Enemy? Friend? Confusing mix. Think rival and friend. Best friend?'_

_'The scarf is important. Shouldn't lose it. Why throw it away?'_

_'Used to always be happy and stupidly overexcited. Sad now, and scared. It's wrong. Feels guilty—something about leaving.'_

_'Always starting fights and almost burning down guild.'_

_'Doesn't know how to let go.'_

_'Flame brain, squinty eyes, ash for brains.'_

_'Why do you feel so bad? Stop looking at me like that.'_

_'Met as kids. Didn't get along at first. Always fighting.'_

_'Obsessed with dragons.'_

Natsu wasn't sure what to make of it all as he read through the entire list of several dozen statements. Some of the things listed were normal, mundane facts. Some of them were a little more cryptic—what was it supposed to mean, that he didn't know how to let go? Some of them—the ones about his emotional state in particular—were unnervingly insightful.

He looked up at Gray. He knew that there were questions he needed to ask, but he couldn't figure out what they were. In any case, Gray started talking again anyway.

"You see what I mean?" the ice mage asked absently, his own dark eyes studying the page intently. "Everything is all jumbled up and nothing connects. It's one of the reasons I find it so hard to use names. To me, each of you is just a mashed up jumble of half-remembered things that don't connect. You're a collection of traits and almost-memories, but you aren't a cohesive whole."

He scowled faintly. "Who is Natsu? It should mean something to me, but I know no Natsu. I only know someone who is a mixture of all these things. I mean, sure, I know you, but you aren't a meaningful whole, really. You're the person I see every day plus all of these random things, and I don't know how to put them all together. I keep looking for a way to connect everything. I'm looking for what makes you  _Natsu_ rather than just a collection of unrelated traits, but I haven't found it yet."

Natsu stared at Gray in horrified silence, a sick feeling curling in his stomach. That…was depressing. He tried to imagine what it would be like if all the people surrounding him were almost familiar but also alien at the same time, if everyone was confusing because even their own names weren't enough to hold all of their qualities into cohesive wholes. It sounded terrible, to be honest.

"Oh, Gray," he breathed sadly.

The ice mage shifted uncomfortably and bit his lip. "It's not so bad, really. I've gotten used to it."

"You shouldn't have to have gotten used to it," Natsu muttered, his eyes narrowing slightly and his hands tightening around the notebook.

Gray had only had to get used to it because he had protected Natsu from Memento Mori. The dragon slayer let out a breath. It was stupid to still blame himself for that, but it still didn't sit well with him that Gray was in this situation because of what he had had to do for Natsu.

"It's not your fault."

Natsu looked up at Gray in surprise. The ice mage was watching him sadly.

"I never said that it was," the dragon slayer replied.

"You didn't have to," Gray said with a sigh.

Natsu glanced away. Funny how even now Gray could still sometimes read him like a book.

"Need something more cheerful," Gray muttered to himself.

Natsu raised an eyebrow at him as the ice mage frowned thoughtfully. Then Gray's face lit up and he hopped off the couch. Natsu watched as he quickly crossed the room and paused in front of the bookshelf to select a book. Gray returned and sat next to Natsu again, handing the book to the dragon slayer.

Natsu frowned at it in confusion. "What is this?" he asked.

Gray blinked and seemed to consider the question. "I…don't completely know," he admitted. He snatched the notebook from Natsu and retrieved the pen. "Should probably write that down."

Natsu watched him scribble in the notebook for a second, but his attention was quickly drawn back to the book in his hands. He opened it and his eyes widened as he realized that it was actually a bound sketchbook.

"You drew these?" he asked in awe.

Gray glanced over and peered at the pictures curiously. "How should I know?" the ice mage asked dismissively. "But it seems likely."

"Funny," Natsu commented, "I never knew you could draw."

He flipped through the pages slowly, pausing frequently to examine the drawings. Some of them were landscapes or still lifes, but most were of people. There were several of Lyon and a woman he now recognized as Ur, and of a woman and man who looked like they might be Gray's parents. There were a few of other people and even enemies who didn't seem terribly important to Natsu, but in who Gray must have seen something interesting enough to try to capture with a pencil. Some of the people Natsu didn't recognize at all, but most of the pictures were of Fairy Tail mages. Everyone was featured at least occasionally, but Erza, Lucy, Happy, and Natsu himself appeared the most frequently. They were in all different poses, captured in all different situations. Natsu recognized a few of the scenes as events that had actually happened.

He was amazed at how detailed and lifelike the drawings were. Most were done in pencil, everything painstakingly outlined and shaded. Many of them also had elements of color, and a few had been done in watercolor or were a combination of pencil and watercolor. Natsu supposed that maybe all of Gray's neatness and precision would give him an edge in such things, but at the same time, the dragon slayer had never even considered that he did something like this.

"I wonder why you never told me," he mused as studied a drawing of Happy offering Charle a fish. The she-cat had her arms crossed and her nose turned up, and Natsu almost wanted to laugh because it was a pretty good representation of how all of Happy's flirting ended up.

"You would have made fun of it," Gray remarked, sounding neither angry nor offended.

"I wouldn't—"

Natsu paused and grimaced. In truth, if he had run across this before Gray had turned into an amnesiac, he probably would have teased the ice mage mercilessly. They were always teasing each other about this or that, and this would have made perfect ammunition. Not much was usually off-limits for their teasing, but if Gray had been hiding this, it had been effectively off the playing field. Why? The only reason Natsu could think of was that these drawings had been so intensely personal to Gray that he didn't think he could handle Natsu making a mockery of them.

Natsu shouldn't feel bad because this constant teasing was something they had both done and rather enjoyed, but some small part of him still felt guilty. He felt bad that Gray hadn't felt like he could show Natsu these things without being made fun of.

"It's okay," Gray said anxiously, sensing Natsu's melancholy.

The dragon slayer hummed absently in agreement and turned the page. He smiled nostalgically at the drawing of Team Natsu, back when they had still been together and gone on jobs all the time. There was Lucy laughing at something Natsu had said. Erza looked like she was about to reprimand the dragon slayer for something, although her lips were curled into a faint half-smile as she watched Natsu. Natsu himself was clearly in the middle of telling one of his stupid stories, his arms thrown out wide for emphasis and a toothy grin plastered on his face. Happy hovered in the air next to him, his feathered wings spread wide against the sky. Gray stood a little off to the side, his hands in his pockets as he watched the rest of the group with a small smile playing at the corners of his lips.

Natsu paused on that picture and stared at it for a long time, trying to resurrect the feeling of those days when everyone had been together and they had all been happy and Gray wasn't dead or amnesic. He could actually feel tears pricking at the corners of his eyes and his heart twisted painfully, because he missed those days. He missed those days so, so much.

"He must have really cared about you a lot," Gray murmured suddenly.

Natsu glanced over. The ice mage had leaned in a little and was studying the drawing intently. The dragon slayer wanted to protest at the use of the third person again, but he knew that there was no point.

"Why do you say that?" he asked instead, his voice subdued.

"It's the way he drew," Gray explained thoughtfully. "There's a lot of love in the way he drew. Can't you see it? How much care he put into all the details? How hard he worked to get your expressions just right? How he tried to capture everything he loved about you in a single pose and didn't give up until it was perfect?"

Natsu considered that and looked at the picture again. Yes, he could see how a lot of painstaking care had been put into making it just right. It was a labor of love to be sure.

"And look at how he drew himself," Gray added, tapping one pale finger over his representation on the page. "Look at his expression. He looks at you like you all mean the world to him."

Gray fell silent and stared at the drawing wistfully, as if he wished he could remember those feelings. For his part, Natsu felt a lump in his throat.

"Yeah," he managed finally. "You always cared so much."

Gray averted his eyes, shame and regret flickering across his face. Natsu immediately felt bad. He hadn't meant to make his friend unhappy again.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean it like that."

Gray shrugged, but kept his eyes fixed on his hands, which he had folded in his lap. "You know, I wasn't quite sure what to make of you at first," the ice mage said quietly. "I mean, I wasn't really sure what to make of anyone and I'm still not, to be honest, but you were the hardest to make sense of once the memory flashes started. For most of the others all the pieces kind of line up in one way or another.

"For you…Well, some of the memories I had of you were of being angry, of being hurt, of wanting to fight and throw insults. It almost made it seem like maybe we weren't really that close. But then I'd also get memories of all the good times we had too, so it was confusing because I wasn't sure if you were really an enemy or a friend. But you know…Even the angry memories of fighting and insults have a kind of fond undercurrent. I think that despite everything else, he must have really liked you a lot because a lot of times when I look at you, he makes me want to smile."

Natsu sniffled and rubbed at his eyes as a few tears broke loose.

"Oh God, don't cry," Gray said apprehensively, twisting his hands together anxiously. "I'm sorry."

Natsu laughed breathlessly, the tears running down his face. "Don't be sorry," he choked out. "I've always liked you a lot too, ice block."

Gray smiled a little uncertainly, but still seemed uncomfortable with the situation. The dragon slayer decided that it was time to move on, both because of Gray's discomfort and because of the fact that Natsu didn't want to cry anymore. He turned the page, and then frowned.

This drawing was different. It was hastily sketched, the lines slashed along the page in hurried arcs that lacked the precision of most of the other pieces. The picture still displayed clear artistic talent, but it was more of a shadowy, panicky mess of dark lines that came together to capture the scene in a few hurried strokes.

Natsu recognized that scene too—it was from Galuna Island. Gray was shoved in the back, his form mostly obscured by the swirling lines that represented his magic as he prepared to use iced shell, but the main focus was on Deliora and Natsu. The demon's fist was coming down on Natsu, hovering in the air just above the dragon slayer's head. Time was frozen at what seemed like a second before Deliora would crush Natsu or fall apart.

"Why's this here?" Natsu asked curiously.

Something about this drawing disturbed him. Gray had been right when he had said that he could feel the love and care put into the other pictures, but the only feelings Natsu was getting off of this one were fear and despair and pain.

"Nightmare," Gray answered absently. "There are a few of them in here. You can tell because the style is different."

Natsu opened his mouth to ask another question, but Gray wasn't paying attention to him. The ice mage snatched the book out of Natsu's hands and began feverishly scrawling words over it. Natsu wanted to tell him to stop ruining the piece, but he also didn't want to interrupt when Gray was clearly remembering something.

Instead, he peered over Gray's shoulder to read his words.

_'Galuna Island.'_

_'Lyon, why?'_

_'Deliora—not again, not again.'_

_'Oh God, Ur, I'm sorry.'_

_'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'_

_'It's going to kill everyone again—use the spell. Use the goddamn spell.'_

_'Get out of the way, Natsu. It's going to kill you. It's going to kill you and I can't watch that.'_

_'Didn't my voice reach you?'_

Gray underlined the last sentence, the pen slashing harshly underneath the words several times. Natsu let out his breath in a hiss, and Gray looked over at him. The feverish intensity was fading from the ice mage's eyes now, the sudden surge of emotion disappearing as quickly as it had come. Natsu supposed that this was what Gray meant by not being able to hold on to the memories for long.

"Does it mean something to you?" Gray asked with polite curiosity.

Natsu swallowed hard. Everything Gray had written was terrible and pointed to the fact that he had still been upset and felt guilty over everything that had happened with Galuna Island, but it was the last line that really caught his attention.

"Yeah," he rasped finally. "It means something to me."

Gray looked back down at what he had written, his eyes tracing over his words thoughtfully. "It must have meant something to him too," he remarked. "I got some pretty intense emotions off of that one before it faded."

It was good to know that Gray really had taken those words to heart, but it had also rattled Natsu.

"Good," the dragon slayer said numbly.

Gray glanced up at him and studied his face thoughtfully. "It's kind of an interesting coincidence, isn't it?" he asked.

Natsu frowned slightly, shaking himself out of his reverie. "What do you mean?"

"It was your voice, right? The one he was supposed to hear?"

Natsu stared at him. "You could say that," he replied, unsure of where this was going.

"Well, it was your voice that pulled me back out of the void again, wasn't it? I guess your voice must have reached him after all."

For a second, Natsu couldn't breathe. He suddenly recalled that before Gray had started learning everyone's names, his label for the dragon slayer had been the 'voice', because he had first met Natsu in the void as a kind of voice projection. Natsu had never been that good with irony and wasn't one to look for meaning in every little thing, but that connection suddenly seemed important, so he held on to it as tightly as he could. Any little thing to bring him comfort.

Yes, come to think of it, Natsu had gotten through to Gray on more than one occasion, reminding him of important things when he forgot them. He had reminded Gray that his life was worth living on Galuna Island, and he had reminded Gray of what he had lost back in the void. And he'd be damned if he didn't help Gray remember this time too.

"You heard my voice, huh?" he said slowly. A determined look glinted in his eyes. "Are you still listening?"

Gray eyed him curiously. "Yes."

"Well, right now I'm saying that we should get Juvia to call up Meredy and take another stab at making you remember."

"What?" Gray's curiosity quickly turned into apprehension.

"It's up to you," Natsu said, frowning at the ground. "I said that we'd wait until you were ready to try something like this again, and I meant it. If you aren't ready then we can wait, but…You want to get your memories back, right?" Gray nodded slowly. "I think that both of us are better prepared than we were last time, so it shouldn't be as much of a fiasco. It certainly helped a little before since you started remembering things. Now that you understand a lot more and you're ready to remember, it might help you put the pieces together and make the connections you need to make if you have a link to someone else to help you. But this is your choice. I won't push you on this if you don't want me to."

Natsu watched Gray anxiously as the ice mage bit his lip and considered the proposition silently. Natsu couldn't really blame Gray for being apprehensive after what had happened last time, but he also thought that this might be the push that Gray needed, as long as the ice mage was more prepared this time. Something in the dragon slayer's mind whispered  _'last chance'_ , but Natsu brushed it off irritably since it didn't make any sense. They would still have lots of chances to try to fix Gray's memory if this didn't work. All the same, Natsu was eager to put this plan into motion. He thought that now that he had a better understanding of Gray's situation, he could do a better job. And now that Gray had started remembering things and feeling things and was actually interested in getting the rest of his memories back, Natsu thought that he was better prepared for this too.

But at the same time, Natsu had already screwed this up once and he didn't want to do that again. He had told Gray that it was okay to say no if he wasn't ready, and Natsu would respect that if he had to.

"Alright," Gray said finally, his eyes uncertain.

"You don't have to do this just because I asked you too," Natsu replied cautiously, making sure that Gray wasn't just agreeing to everything he asked again.

"I know." Gray looked down at his hands as he twisted them together in his lap. "I don't know if it will work, but…" He swallowed and looked back up to meet Natsu's gaze steadily. "I trust you."

Natsu stared back at him for a moment. "Yeah," he said past the lump in his throat. "We'll do it right this time. But it you start getting too overwhelmed again, you can call a stop to the whole thing."

Gray let out a shaky breath. Natsu thought he might say something else, but only three words came out of his mouth:

"I trust you."

* * *

Despite his declaration of trust, Gray was, understandably, still a little apprehensive about the idea of asking for Meredy's help again. He tried to hide his discomfort, but Natsu could still catch glimpses of it sometimes. But it really would be different this time. This time it would be Gray who was setting the pace, not Natsu. Natsu wasn't just going to be shoving emotions at his friend left and right—he would only provide Gray with what he asked for. Gray would look for the missing connection and Natsu would help as best he could. After all, Natsu was starting to suspect that Levy had been right when she said that this was something Gray would have to figure out for himself. Natsu could try to help out, but ultimately it was up to Gray.

So Natsu and Gray went back to the guild and explained their plan. Gray showed them the notebook somewhat reluctantly, and now an air of hopeful excitement hung over the guild. Natsu supposed he shouldn't be surprised—that had been exactly what Gray was afraid of. But still, a little hope here and there wasn't always a bad thing.

Without further ado, Juvia eagerly sent a message to Meredy, however it was that she did that. Natsu wanted to ask but he didn't think she would tell him, especially given their still somewhat strained relationship. The dragon slayer was all for calling Rufus up too, only to be informed that he had managed to get picked up by the Council again. Apparently Sting had been wrong when he had assumed that it was Orga who had been causing the problems that first time. Natsu didn't let it bother him too much. Gray already had some memories this time, and Natsu suspected that the important part would be connecting the right emotions to those memories and finding a way to anchor them there to turn them into something meaningful.

Of course, they would have to wait for Meredy and Jellal to arrive, and they knew that it could be days or even weeks. In the meantime, things had changed slightly now that the others all knew about the things Gray had been hiding. Gray didn't bother being as secretive anymore. He had begun carrying his notebook around again and could frequently be seen writing in it. He was also a little more open about sharing his flashes of memory with the others, and they all tried to help explain things to him when they could, hoping that maybe something they said would help him make that vital connection. So far it hadn't, but they could keep trying.

Still, everyone was impatient for Crime Sorcière to finally show up. In fact, they were so focused on the upcoming arrival that they were taken completely by surprise when something else showed up first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was a lot of stuff. The thing with Gray's mom is kinda cliché and not part of my main headcanon, but I needed a bridge and my original plan didn't pan out. The drawing thing is an idea I play with occasionally but isn't in my main headcanon. I used it here because it serves a purpose both here and later. Aside from that...I guess it might have been fun to write out more of what's in Gray's notebook, but this chapter was already getting way too long. And sorry about that last bit after the line break. It was supposed to be the intro to the next chapter, but then another chapter got inserted in between and it didn't really fit anymore, so now it's here instead.


	22. Ch 21-Gray takes control of his life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here is the chapter that never should have existed. I spent the last few days writing it based on a comment a reviewer made that I decided to run with. I thought it would be a short chapter since I wasn't sure what to do with it, but somehow it ended up being one of the longest ones x.x
> 
> Anyway, since this is a last-minute addition, it's not the super angsty chapter many of you have been anticipating/dreading. That will come next chapter : )

* * *

**Chapter 21**

_(In which Gray panics and gets a new incentive to take control of his life.)_

* * *

When Natsu was awoken much too early in the morning by insistent banging on his door, his first thought was to roll over and go right back to sleep. Whoever was at the door was more than welcome to come back around during daylight hours.

"You should go see who's at the door," Happy murmured sleepily.

Natsu didn't bother opening his eyes. "Nah."

"If it's this early then it might be important."

"If it's that important then they'll come back later," Natsu grumbled, pulling the blankets over his head.

"Nat _su_ …"

"You go answer it if it bothers you that much."

There was the sound of irritable grumbling and soft pawsteps as Happy reluctantly dragged himself out of bed and left the room, cursing Natsu under his breath. Natsu just shrugged it off and tried to go back to sleep, but he'd only made it to a state of semi-wakefulness before Happy's voice pulled him back to awareness.

"Natsu!" the Exceed called. The dragon slayer frowned, wondering why Happy suddenly sounded so worried. "Gray's here and he's upset. Hurry up!"

Natsu jumped out of bed in sudden panic, his legs tangling in the covers and sending him crashing to the ground. Cursing, he pulled himself to his feet and hurried out of the room, skidding to a halt in front of the still-open front door. Happy was suspended in the air just inside the house, peering at Gray in concern. Gray was still standing outside, hovering in the shadows, his head bowed and his arms wrapped tightly around himself.

"Gray?" Natsu asked apprehensively. "Are you alright?"

For a moment, the ice mage didn't speak. When he finally answered the question, his voice was quiet and edged in fear, and he still didn't look up. "There's something wrong with me."

Natsu's heart stuttered to a stop for a few painful seconds. No, nothing could be wrong, not when things were going so well.

"What is it?" the dragon slayer asked fearfully. Gray just shook his head silently and shrank back further, away from the light spilling from the open doorway, as if he didn't really want to be there. "Is it the curse?" Natsu guessed.

"No. Yes. No." Gray shook his head again. "It's strong today, but that's not what—not what…" He trailed off and let out a shaky breath, somehow managing to curl into himself even more.

"What's wrong?" Natsu asked again, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. "Here, come inside."

He reached out to Gray, but the ice mage glanced up at the sudden movement and his eyes widened as he jerked back, out of Natsu's reach. The dragon slayer stopped short and slowly withdrew his hand. Gray didn't usually react like that to touch anymore, not since that time he'd had a complete meltdown in the guild hall.

The two friends stared at each other for a few seconds. Natsu's concern deepened, because Gray's eyes had a panicked light in them that he didn't like.

"Sorry, I…Sorry," the ice mage choked out.

"It's alright," Natsu said soothingly, fighting to stay calm so that he could maybe get Gray to relax a little and tell him what was wrong. "You came all the way here. Don't you want to come inside?"

Gray hesitated, his eyes darting between Natsu and Happy. Then he let out a shuddering breath. "Yeah, but…Before I do, there's—there's something you should know."

Natsu swallowed hard and exchanged a look with Happy, who looked just as worried as the dragon slayer felt. "What is it?"

"I…" Gray paused again and looked away. "The curse was strong tonight and I woke up from another nightmare of the void. But when I woke up…something was different."

"What was different?" Happy asked cautiously when Gray hesitated again and looked like he didn't want to continue.

"I—I look…There's something wrong with me." Gray trailed off forlornly again, and Natsu frowned. The ice mage was too upset to be making much sense right now.

"Look, we're letting all the bugs in," the dragon slayer prodded gently. "Why don't you come in, and we can talk about whatever happened and figure out how to make it better again."

Gray wavered a moment longer. "Yeah," he said, as if trying to convince himself. "But I, uh, I look a little…different."

Natsu felt his eyebrows inching upwards as he wondered what the hell that was supposed to mean. Then Gray inched forward into the light and the shadows cloaking him fell away, and Natsu finally understood. Strange black markings had worked their way across nearly half of Gray's face and had stained one of his hands as well. Gray was wearing pants and a long-sleeved jacket that he was tugging at self-consciously, but Natsu suspected that the markings were visible all up his side as well.

The dragon slayer sucked in a breath, his eyes widening. For a split second he panicked, but then he recognized the markings and some of the tension drained out of him. He didn't know that they weren't a bad sign—maybe they were a visible indicator that something bad was happening to Gray—but he'd seen them before and they hadn't done anything terrible last time. Maybe. It was hard to determine what exactly they did and where they had come from. Although given that they had first appeared with the curse and then Gray had collapsed and 'died' shortly after they'd disappeared…

"It's gonna be okay," Natsu whispered, trying to smile. "You've had those before."

"I've…had them…before?" Gray repeated slowly, his brow crinkling as he searched through his shattered memory.

Natsu nodded. "Yeah. Come on in and let's see if we can't figure this out."

Gray hesitantly stepped forward, paused, and then took a few more small steps until he was inside the house and Happy had closed the door behind him. He had wrapped his arms around himself again so that the hand with the markings was no longer visible, and was looking anywhere but at Natsu and Happy.

"Is there something wrong with me or not?" he asked finally, his voice low.

"I…don't know." Natsu didn't want to discourage Gray, but he also didn't want to say that everything was perfectly fine only to have it blow up in their faces later. "Those markings appeared when you were hit by the curse, and they disappeared on their own after you defeated our opponent and stopped using your devil slayer magic. I'm not sure what exactly caused them, but they didn't do anything bad last time. I don't know why they're showing up again now, but we'll figure it out, alright?"

"I want them to go away," Gray said in a small voice.

Natsu bit his lip. He didn't know how to make them go away. What they needed now was ideas from the rest of the guild. Hopefully they could collaborate to piece together some kind of theory and figure out what was going on. Natsu glanced at the clock and winced. It wasn't even five yet, and no one would be in the guild for a while. They'd have some time to kill until then.

"Okay, here's what we're going to do," he decided, trying to sound more confident than he felt. "In a couple hours we're going to go to the guild. None of us are very familiar with the curse or your devil slayer magic or these markings, but I've seen some of it in action before so maybe we can make something of that. Levy said that she researched curses and devil slayer magic, so maybe she'll know something useful. I don't know if Lyon will know anything about this magic, but he might have some ideas. We've got some clever people in the guild and I bet we can work out a solution."

Gray didn't look reassured. Whatever faint hope he might have shown when Natsu had declared he'd seen the markings before immediately faded when he realized that the dragon slayer didn't have any real idea of how to fix the problem.

"Okay," he said anyway.

Happy looked up at Natsu and frowned. "We can't go to the guild for hours yet. What do we do in the meantime?"

Natsu grimaced faintly and thought it over. As much as he'd love to pull a solution out of thin air, he really had no idea what to do right now. If he couldn't solve the problem…If he couldn't solve the problem, then the least he could do was try to get Gray to calm down. Right now the ice mage was still obviously freaked out, but there wasn't any point worrying until they could get to the guild and start getting everyone's input. Until then…Natsu needed a distraction.

"Hm…How about we make some hot chocolate and sit in the kitchen and talk," he suggested. He looked to Gray for agreement. "You said that the curse was being loud again, right? If we talk then maybe it'll start dying down a little."

Gray finally tore his gaze away from the ground so that he could stare at Natsu blankly. "Can you even make hot chocolate?"

Natsu smiled a little despite himself. "Not really, but I was hoping that maybe you could show me how."

He realized a second later that that was something of a loaded request. Gray had referenced hot chocolate on that job they had taken on Mt. Hakobe, but he hadn't made it since the void. Asking him to do it now would basically be asking him to conjure up a memory, and although Gray hadn't been quite as touchy about those recently, it was still probably better not to push it.

Thankfully, Gray didn't seem bothered. He just tilted his head and studied the floor with a faint frown for a moment, before nodding and unfolding his arms to let them hang at his sides again. "Sure," he said. "I can do that."

Natsu resisted the urge to sigh in relief. Hopefully if he could get Gray involved in this pointless scheme and keep him talking, it would distract him from his worry over the markings.

"Great," the dragon slayer said, trying for cheerfulness. "Off to the kitchen then." He automatically reached out to Gray, who immediately shrank back again. "Oh shit, I'm sorry."

Gray looked away. "Not that side," he said quietly.

Natsu stared at him, trying to figure that out, and then grimaced as it finally clicked. He had thought it odd that Gray had reacted so strongly when he'd tried to touch the ice mage before. Combining that with the way Gray kept trying to hide the markings and wasn't making good eye contact…

Letting out a breath, Natsu reached out again and closed his hand firmly around Gray's wrist, ignoring the inky markings marring the pale skin. The ice mage hissed in surprise and tried to tug his hand out of Natsu's grasp, but the dragon slayer hung on with grim determination.

"Don't touch it," Gray said, fear creeping into his voice. Glancing down at his blackened skin, his lip curled in something like disgust and he looked at it like it was diseased.

"It's fine," Natsu replied firmly. "They look a little funny, but they're not doing anything to me."

Gray's expression didn't change. He tried yanking his hand away again, but Natsu held on. His frown deepening, he held out his other hand. "If you want to touch so badly then touch this one."

"No." Natsu met Gray's gaze steadily. "There's nothing wrong with this one. It doesn't bother me or make me uncomfortable. It's your hand, plain and simple. Whatever it looks like, it's still  _yours_  and there's nothing wrong with it." His eyes softened a little. "You look exactly the same."

The ice mage stared at him in confusion. "No I don't," he said tightly.

"Sure you do," Natsu said conversationally. "Okay, so you've suddenly gotten some new markings. So what? In all the ways that matter, you're exactly the same. When I look at you, I see the same person I've been seeing for the past few months, not a bunch of stupid black marks." He glanced over at Happy and raised an eyebrow. "Agree?"

The Exceed nodded. "Gray is Gray." Then he gave the ice mage a conspiratorial smile. "If it would make you feel better, I can color on Natsu with a sharpie. I'm pretty sure there's one lost somewhere in one of the kitchen cabinets."

"Whoa," Natsu protested, "don't volunteer my skin!"

Gray looked back and forth between the two of them for a few seconds and then laughed. He was still obviously upset, but something Natsu had said must have gotten through to him, because he finally stopped putting up a fight.

"Okay," he said, relaxing the tiniest bit. "You can look for it while I make the hot chocolate."

Natsu made a few feeble protests as he tugged Gray to the kitchen, but he was mostly just relieved that his friend wasn't as panicky as he'd been before. Happy pretended to search for a sharpie for a few seconds—just to tease Natsu since no one was actually expecting him to scribble on the dragon slayer—but then settled down to watch Gray work.

The ice mage paused for a moment to take in the disaster zone that was the kitchen. "It's such a mess. How do you ever find anything?"

Natsu snorted. "Tell me what you need and I'll find it."

Gray shrugged and rattled off a list of ingredients and kitchenware, which Natsu and Happy scurried around to search for. As they found the items he requested, Gray got started, moving with a practiced ease as if he had done this a hundred times before.

"Where is, um, Lyon?" he asked as he stirred some kind of chocolatey mixture in a saucepan on the stove. "Isn't he supposed to be here with you?"

Natsu smirked. "I finally got annoyed of him and kicked him out."

Gray looked over at him in surprise. "Really?"

"Oh, don't listen to him," Happy said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. "One of Lyon's guildmates showed up in the evening and was hysterical. The dog guy. We couldn't make sense of anything he was saying, but he wanted Lyon to help him with something. Lyon couldn't really say no, but he definitely wasn't happy about it. I'd expect him back by the time we get to the guild, honestly. There's no way he'd risk missing Meredy's arrival. He really wants to be here when we try recovering your memories again."

"Oh." Gray's eyes dimmed a little as he returned to staring at the saucepan.

Natsu studied him thoughtfully for a moment. He didn't think that Gray had come here tonight for Lyon, but he was starting to suspect that Gray could use some support from his adoptive brother right about now. Natsu hoped that Lyon would hurry up.

"That's not true," Gray muttered under his breath, scowling down at the stove as his hand clenched around the spoon so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

Natsu started in surprise and glanced over at Happy, wondering if he had somehow missed something, but the Exceed looked just as unsettled. Neither of them had said anything, and Gray didn't seem to be talking to them anyway.

The ice mage's movements slowed until his stirring came to a complete stop. He stared blankly into space. "I don't know," he whispered, suddenly sounding desolate.

Natsu and Happy exchanged looks. This was disconcerting as hell, but Natsu had a bad feeling that he might have some idea of what was going on here.

"Gray?" he asked carefully.

Gray jerked around to stare at him with startled eyes, and then shook his head to clear it and resumed his stirring. "Sorry," he mumbled.

Natsu hesitated, not sure he should press too hard when Gray was already so jittery, but also afraid that ignoring the problem would only make it worse.

"Is the curse talking to you?" the dragon slayer asked cautiously.

Gray's lips tightened and he shrugged. "It's not that simple. It's not so much like talking, but…it kind of is, too. I don't know. It's strong enough to use words tonight. It's loud."

Natsu still wasn't exactly sure how this worked. From what he'd seen of Gray's memories of his earlier 'death', it had almost seemed like Memento Mori had achieved some degree of sentience, and he could recall hints of whispered things that it had slipped into Gray's mind. But it was also strange because it obviously wasn't  _alive_ , exactly, either. Natsu didn't really understand it.

"What's it saying?" Happy asked.

Gray's expression immediately closed off and his grip tightened on the spoon again. "Nothing important."

Natsu was inclined to disagree, but he wasn't going to push it right now, not until Gray was calmer. Even though Gray was no longer rambling in panic, he was still tense and jumpy, and the curse probably wasn't helping.

"Don't talk to it," Natsu said. "We're trying to drown it out, not converse with it. Besides, Happy and I are way more fun to talk to."

Gray stared at him for a moment and then let out a breath. "Yeah. Okay."

"Great," Natsu said with a sigh of relief. "Are you almost done?"

"Grab some milk," Gray replied. "I've basically done everything except stir in the milk now. Also, I hope you have marshmallows. They're a necessary requirement."

Natsu obediently fetched the requested items. When Gray was satisfied that he'd added the exact right quantity of milk to the mixture in the saucepan, he turned off the heat. He continued to stir for a few more seconds, but then frowned suddenly and looked at Happy.

"Should you be drinking this?" he asked the feline doubtfully. "Chocolate isn't good for cats."

Happy huffed out a breath and stuck his nose in the air. "I'm an Exceed, not a cat," he replied haughtily. "I can handle chocolate just fine. Although I prefer fish."

Gray wrinkled his nose in disgust. "I can't think of a worse flavor pairing than hot chocolate and fish."

"Fish makes everything taste better," Happy protested.

Gray was unconvinced. "No fish."

"It's just not worth drinking if there's no fish," the Exceed said with a dramatic sigh.

"Fine," Natsu said. "I'll drink yours for you then."

Happy's eyes widened. "No! That's not fair!"

"But I thought you didn't want any because it doesn't have fish?" Gray asked, joining in Natsu's teasing. The dragon slayer was relieved to see one corner of his mouth quirk upwards in amusement. Maybe the plan to distract Gray was working after all.

"It would be  _better_ with fish, but I still want it anyway," Happy whined.

Gray smiled. "Well, go find me some mugs and you can have some."

"Yay!" Happy ransacked the cluttered cabinets until he'd managed to find three mugs that were in fairly good shape. Sure, one was missing a handle and the other two had an impressive assortment of chips and discolorations, but they could still do the job.

Gray eyed the ramshackle collection dubiously. "Well, I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything different from you," he said dryly as he began carefully pouring the cocoa into the mugs.

"Hey, it works." Natsu shrugged.

Gray rolled his eyes and turned to grab the bag of marshmallows. "Alright, now we just need the marsh—" He broke off and froze, staring at the bag. "What the hell is this?" he demanded.

"Marshmallows," Natsu answered, not seeing the problem.

"They're the  _giant_ marshmallows!" Gray's face twisted in disgust. "You don't want those for hot chocolate. You need the mini ones."

"Those are normal-sized marshmallows…" Natsu said slowly, shaking his head in mild bafflement. "Hardly giant."

"Compared to the mini ones, they're giant," Gray replied with a scowl, gingerly poking at the bag with one of his non-blackened fingers.

"Why are you so biased against the normal ones?" Happy asked, his whiskers twitching as he tried not to laugh.

"The normal ones are fine," Gray snapped. "Great, even. But not for hot chocolate. For hot chocolate you need the small ones."

"Well, we don't have any," Natsu said unsympathetically. "You'll have to make those work."

Gray grumbled something unintelligible under his breath as he opened the bag. He started to reach inside, but quickly snatched his hand back as he realized that he had been about to use the one covered in the strange markings. He eyed it warily for a second as if it might bite him, and then carefully used his other hand to pull out some marshmallows.

Natsu resisted the urge to sigh. He couldn't say if the markings were a bad sign or not—and he was worried about their sudden reappearance, to be honest—but he certainly didn't think that they'd contaminate everything they touched. Gray was acting like they were contagious or something. Clearly he was not distracted enough yet.

"I don't know if it's better to make them smaller or leave them as they are," Gray mused, eyeing the fluffy white confections. "But they should be small…I'll try cutting them up and we'll see how it works."

He started chopping up the marshmallows into much smaller pieces, somehow managing not to just squish them everywhere. Natsu rolled his eyes, wondering if the size of the marshmallows was really  _that_ important. But Gray was the one in charge, and the ice mage clearly had his heart set on miniature marshmallows. He dumped the mangled remains of the sugary puffs into the cocoa and pushed mugs towards Natsu and Happy, who took them happily and retreated to sit at the table.

"Well, it will have to do," Gray said with a sigh, sitting down across from Natsu.

Natsu watched him carefully and took an absentminded sip of his hot chocolate. "This is actually really good," he said in surprise, savoring the rich chocolate flavor with the barest hints of peppermint and vanilla. "Definitely better than Lyon's."

"Of course it is," Gray said dismissively. "His hot chocolate tastes like ditch water."

Natsu barked out a surprised laugh and almost choked on his cocoa. "Wow, that's harsh."

"In Isvan—and in other really cold places too, probably—hot chocolate is practically an art form," Gray replied distractedly. "The fact that he still can't make a decent cup is a disgrace."

Happy snickered. "I'm sure he'd be glad to hear that."

"I used to tell him that all the time. One day I'll have to show him how to do it right."

Natsu hummed thoughtfully, watching as Gray absently swirled the hot chocolate around in his mug before taking a small sip. The ice mage's eyes were unfocused again and his hands were wrapped tightly around the mug, trembling slightly. With a renewed sense of determination, Natsu stubbornly started up a string of cheerful banter, refusing to give up until he was sure that both Happy and Gray were well and truly involved. He stole occasional glances at the clock to see how much longer they had to wait before heading to the guild, but the minute hand seemed to move at a snail's pace.

When Happy finished his drink, he yawned and hopped into Gray's lap to curl into a ball. Natsu raised an eyebrow, but Gray just smiled faintly and started stroking the little cat's fur. Happy sighed in contentment, and when Gray skillfully found all the right places to scratch and stroke, he actually started to purr.

"That feels nice," Happy purred, wiggling about a little. "You're way better than Natsu. You should give him lessons."

"Hey!" the dragon slayer protested.

"It's true," Happy murmured, his eyes closing in pleasure. "Wow, I wish you petted me more, Gray."

Petting the little feline seemed to be having a calming effect on the ice mage. The more that Happy purred and relaxed, the more Gray seemed to relax as well. Maybe it was the repetitive motion of the stroking, or just the comfort inherent in having a warm, fuzzy companion to hold.

"I always liked cats," Gray remarked absently, scratching Happy under the chin. The Exceed's front paws twitched in a reflexive kneading motion and he let out a rumbling purr. The corners of Gray's lips twitched upwards, and Natsu smiled a little as well.

"I'm not a cat," Happy mumbled.

Natsu smirked. "Sure you aren't," he said indulgently.

Happy opened one eye to give him a baleful glare, but it fluttered shut again when Gray's fingers found another sensitive spot to rub. Natsu laughed softly. He had to wonder if the reason Happy had initiated this in the first place was because he had thought that it might soothe Gray. Whatever the case, it had been a good idea.

Natsu kept on chattering and made sure to keep Gray talking in case the curse started bothering him again, but Happy was too busy purring and occasionally making faint mewling sounds of contentment to really participate. Maybe Natsu really  _would_  have to pick up some tips from Gray. He'd never seen Happy quite that blissful before.

"Hm, let's give it another hour and then we can head to the guild," Natsu remarked finally, drumming his fingers impatiently on the table as he watched the clock. Time seemed to be crawling, and he just really wanted to find a way to resolve this whole issue already.

Gray immediately stiffened, his fingers stilling in Happy's fur as he pursed his lips and averted his gaze. Natsu silently cursed his stupidity. He'd been doing so well keeping Gray distracted, and then he'd had to go remind him of the problem.

"Uh…" He didn't know how to smooth over that faux pas. "Don't worry so much. They'll get this sorted out in no time." Hopefully.

Gray let out a breath and his gaze caught on the now-empty saucepan sitting on the stove. "I can go ahead and clean up." His eyes travelled the length of the counter, taking in the week's worth of dishes piled there. "All of it, I guess."

"Don't bother," Natsu said dismissively. "I'll take care of it later."

"No you won't," Happy muttered, his eyes still closed.

Natsu rolled his eyes. " _Much_ later."

"It's fine," Gray said tightly. He was getting fidgety and nervous again. His eye caught on his blackened hand and he grimaced. "Unless maybe it's a bad idea with these…things?"

"You already touched all the dishes to make the cocoa and nothing bad happened," Natsu pointed out reasonably. "I don't think you 'contaminated' anything. Honestly. There's nothing wrong with your skin."

"Yeah, but I only touched them because they'd have to be washed later," Gray replied, shifting uneasily.

Natsu sighed. "What exactly do you think is going to happen? The saucepan hasn't spontaneously combusted, the spoon hasn't suddenly picked up a nasty curse, and the knife hasn't sprouted wings and flown away. Happy hasn't mutated into a fish. Also, I touched the markings and so far my hand hasn't shriveled up and died. Relax."

Amusement flickered in Gray's eyes for a split second before it was eclipsed by worry and fear again. "I guess."

"So technically you  _could_ wash dishes with no ill effects," Natsu added, pressing home the point.

"Alright, I'll go do that," Gray said, standing up and depositing Happy on the table.

"Whoa, whoa, don't  _actually_ do it," Natsu said hurriedly, wincing. "Seriously, don't worry about it."

"It helps my nerves to have something to organize or clean," Gray muttered. "It's a good distraction."

Natsu stared at him. "Well, in that case…Go for it, I guess." He sighed and shook his head in amused exasperation. "You have such strange habits and quirks. How are we even friends?"

Gray had started towards the kitchen sink, but paused at Natsu's words. He turned to look at the dragon slayer, a suddenly uncertain expression on his face.

"Are we?" he asked in a small voice.

Natsu frowned. "Are we what?"

Gray glanced away. "Friends."

Natsu's heart skipped a beat and he found himself swallowing hard. "Of course we are. Or…I thought we were?" he asked uncertainly. "Do you not think we're friends? I finally annoyed you too much?"

"What?" Gray looked startled for a moment, before hurriedly backtracking. "No, I mean, it feels like we're friends sometimes, but…I don't know. It's…well…You were friends with—with Gray. Or me from before or whatever. But whatever similarities I share with him, I'm not the same either, am I? I mean, you want him back and that's why you keep me around and try to get me to remember. So…I know that you were friends with him, but if I'm not quite him and not quite  _not_ him, then…"

Natsu let out his breath in a shuddering sigh, his heart twisting painfully. Maybe he should have expected that. Even though Gray didn't usually come out and say anything about the issue, there had been incidents suggesting that he was sometimes insecure in his place with the group. He had warmed up to all his old friends a lot, but was still unsure of how he connected to his old self and of what his relationships with the others should be. Still, Natsu had hoped that some of those insecurities would have started fading by now.

"When you showed me your notebook the other day, didn't I tell you that we'd stand by you no matter what happened?" Natsu sighed heavily. "Look, to us, you now and you in the past are always going to overlap a little, because you're both different  _and_ the same. Yeah, in the beginning we mostly just wanted to get you back to normal—or, you know, the way you were with your memories—but you've grown and changed over these past few months and made new memories of your own. We've gotten to know you better, and I think it's fair to say that we've come to respect you for who you are now, not just who you were.

"To me, you'll always just be Gray. You've changed, sure, but you're still my friend, just like you've always been. Maybe it's a little different, maybe we had to work some things out and change up the dynamics a little, but in the end, what it boils down to is that I rather like  _both_ how you were before and how you are now, alright?"

"You give really good rubs," Happy added. "Sure, we're friends."

Gray's gaze traveled silently between the dragon slayer and the Exceed for a few moments before he dropped his gaze to the ground and turned away to hide the shimmer of unshed tears in his eyes.

"Okay," he whispered. "Thank you."

Natsu and Happy exchanged looks.

"Hey, why don't we help you dry all those dishes and put them away?" Natsu suggested, clearing his throat and trying for a more cheerful tone. "I don't want you poking around in my cabinets. If you organize them, I'll never be able to find anything again."

Gray chuckled wetly. "Alright."

Natsu and Happy threw themselves into the—admittedly annoying—chore of drying dishes and jamming them into cabinets, determinedly maintaining a cheerful conversation. It was a little harder to get Gray involved this time. The ice mage went through the motions of participating, but he became more tense and distracted as time dragged on.

By the time they finished with the dishes and Natsu suggested that they head over to the guild, Gray was a bundle of nerves. His entire body radiated apprehension, and he'd started sneaking worried, fearful glances at the marks on his hand again. The decision to go to the guild seemed to make him even jumpier, reminding Natsu of how reluctant Gray had been to show him what was wrong earlier. Natsu got the feeling that as much as Gray needed the support of the guild, he also didn't really want them to see what was happening to him.

Happy picked up on the increasing tension as well, and settled into Gray's arms as they left the house. Gray petted him absently, but mostly hugged the feline to his chest like a lifeline. He carried Happy all the way to the guild and showed no sign of letting go any time soon.

When they reached the guild hall, Natsu took a deep breath and pushed his way inside first. They had waited long enough that most everyone was there, which had been intentional on Natsu's part. He'd thought it would be better if they could explain the problem to everyone at once. Lyon was there as well, presumably having returned from Lamia Scale shortly before and decided to wait at the guild instead of going to bother Natsu.

"Hey, everyone!" Natsu said loudly.

Everyone looked over and said their good mornings, still blissfully unaware of the morning's events.

"About time you showed up," Lyon said. He scowled. "You will not  _believe_ what idiotic things my guild—" He paused and studied Natsu curiously. "Is everything alright?"

Natsu hummed noncommittally. "Guys, I have Gray, but, uh, something happened. Just…don't freak out, alright?"

The cheerful chatter immediately died out into an anxious almost-silence. Natsu wondered if maybe he could have broached the issue a better way.

"What do you mean, don't freak out?" Erza asked apprehensively.

Natsu shrugged helplessly, not sure of how to best go about things. "Well, Gray…" He trailed off and looked around with a frown, wondering where his friend had gone off to. Turning back around, he spotted the ice mage lurking just outside the guild's entrance, hugging Happy tightly as he tried to disappear into whatever shadows he could find along the walls. Natsu winced. "Hey, it's okay. Come here."

Gray darted a quick glance up at the dragon slayer, fear evident in his eyes, before returning his gaze to the ground. Happy gave Natsu a worried look, and the dragon slayer bit his lip and nodded.

"Gray," he said gently, trying to coax his friend into the building, "you don't have to be scared, alright? They're going to help, remember?"

Whispered murmurings started up when Gray continued to hesitate outside the guild hall, uncertainty and anxiety evident as everyone tried to figure out what was going on.

"What happened?" Lyon demanded. He took a couple steps forward to peer worriedly at Gray. "Gray? Are you alright?"

Gray shrank back a half-step and fidgeted uncomfortably, looking like he'd rather be anywhere but here.

"Gray, look at me," Natsu said quietly. The ice mage reluctantly looked up and met Natsu's eyes. "It's going to be okay. Come here."

Gray hesitated a moment longer and then edged forward a few faltering steps. He paused again before hunching his shoulders and slowly creeping over to Natsu's side, instinctively curling into himself when the rest of the guild finally noticed the markings and reacted.

It was instant chaos as people began asking what the markings were and why they were there. Even worse, despite Natsu's warning, everyone immediately started panicking, which only made Gray more frightened. He clutched Happy closer and pressed himself against Natsu's side. Natsu cursed under his breath and wrapped his arm firmly around Gray's shoulders, feeling the ice mage's body trembling.

"What part of 'don't freak out' did you not understand?" the dragon slayer asked loudly, scowling at the others. "He's already upset about it—don't make it worse."

The assembled mages quieted down some, although Natsu wasn't sure if it was because of his words or because they could see the effect they were having on Gray. The problem was that Gray was already scared, and when the others started panicking it just intensified his fears. Everyone's fears, really. It was a sort of snowball effect, everyone's fears feeding into each other's to make things exponentially worse.

"What happened?" Lucy asked fearfully, staring at the black markings on Gray's face in horror. Gray shrank back from the scrutiny as if he was trying to hide behind Natsu.

"This is going to sound really weird," Erza said slowly, "but for some reason they look almost…familiar?"

Natsu nodded. "They first appeared back when Gray got hit by Memento Mori. You wouldn't have seen that, but you saw my memory of it when we were using Rufus's magic."

"You're right," Erza agreed thoughtfully. "But why are they appearing again now?"

"And what are they doing to him?" Cana added, biting her lip anxiously.

Natsu looked at Gray. "Do you want to tell them what happened tonight?" Gray shook his head mutely and shrugged off Natsu's arm to retreat a few paces. The dragon slayer sighed as he turned back to the others. "He showed up at my door a few hours ago, freaked out. He basically said that the curse had been strong and when he woke up, the marks were just there. I have no idea what might have caused them to reappear now, but I was hoping that we could all put our heads together and figure out what the hell is going on and how to fix it."

He glanced at Levy. "You said that you'd been researching devil slayer magic and curses. I know you said you didn't find much, but I don't suppose that you ran across anything about weird markings?"

She shook her head, her eyes still fixed on Gray. "No, nothing about markings. You said that he got these when he was first hit by the curse? If it's something that the curse caused…It's worrying me because Gray said that the curse wasn't completely gone, even now. Could it be doing something to him?"

Everyone tensed up instantly again, and Natsu hurried to try reassuring them, even though he wasn't sure whether there was anything reassuring about the situation.

"We don't know that it's the curse," he said quickly. "It could also be a side effect of his devil slayer magic."

Erza pursed her lips. "Tell us everything you know about what happened the last time these things appeared, Natsu."

"Well…" Natsu sighed. "They first appeared when Memento Mori hit him and he'd used his devil slayer magic before that point without them showing up, so they might be related to the curse. On the other hand, they disappeared when he stopped using his devil slayer magic, so maybe they have something to do with his magic. Mard Geer also said something about how half his body had been 'demonized' when these appeared, so there's that too."

"I don't want to be a demon," Gray interrupted, new fear in his voice.

Natsu winced. "No one's a demon," he said hurriedly, wishing he hadn't opened his mouth. "I don't really know how that part works, but it's not turning you into a demon or anything. Look, if I had to guess, I'd say that the marks are probably a product of the interaction between your magic and the curse. I mean, that interaction is what let you initially survive Memento Mori but then be thrown into the void, so we know that the two were affecting each other. When Memento Mori hit you is the point at which the two first came into contact, and that's when the markings appeared. I'd say that might be significant."

No one said anything for a long moment. It was clear that they were trying to puzzle out how all these elements fit together and what it might mean for Gray, but Natsu could see that they weren't having any more luck figuring it out than he had had.

"So," Gajeel said finally, "we know that the curse is still hanging out in his head and that apparently it was strong today. The marks might have been caused by the interaction between the curse and his magic, which is also what caused him to 'die' in a horrible way, get stuck in the void, and lose all his memories. Considering all that, things don't look good. Like, what if the curse is just getting stronger and stronger now and is starting to take over again? For all we know, this could be a sign that he's about to start losing memories or even start having seizures and things again."

Natsu stared at him. God, did Gajeel really have to look at the worst case scenario for everything? Natsu didn't—couldn't—believe that something so awful could happen now.

"Ow!" Happy yelped suddenly.

Natsu turned with a frown. Gray had inched a few paces away, and was now staring at Gajeel, his face completely drained of blood. He'd unconsciously tightened his grip on Happy and was rocking back and forth slightly on his heels. He looked terrified.

"Shit," Natsu cursed, glaring at Gajeel. "What the hell did you have to go and say that for? He's already scared enough without you theorizing worst case scenarios!"

Gajeel winced and looked vaguely remorseful. "Look, I'm not trying to scare anyone, but it would be stupid to ignore possibilities just because we don't want to think about them."

Natsu scowled at him but chose to focus on trying to calm Gray down again. "Hey, it's okay," he told Gray. "Gajeel's just stupid and has no idea what he's talking about."

"Hey!" the other dragon slayer protested.

Gray bowed his head to let his hair cover his eyes and hugged Happy tighter. Natsu opened his mouth to try a different tactic, but froze in shock as he noticed a single tear trickling down Gray's cheek. He hadn't seen Gray actually cry in all the time since he'd been rescued from the void. This was bad—a testament to exactly how frightened and upset Gray was about this newest development. Natsu needed to fix this, but it was like his brain had ground to a halt and he had no idea what to do.

"You made him cry," Erza said in a hushed voice. She turned on Gajeel and punched him in the arm hard enough that he cursed and stumbled back a step. "You idiot!" She abandoned her chastisement to frown worriedly at Gray again. "Please don't cry, Gray. We'll figure this out."

"Yeah," Natsu added hurriedly. "The markings probably aren't even that big a deal. Nothing as bad as Gajeel was making them out to be."

Gajeel's cold front had immediately dropped when he saw Gray huddled in the corner crying, and the dragon slayer twisted his hands together anxiously as he hurried to try mitigating some of the damage.

"Yeah, don't mind me," he babbled. "I'm just stupid and have no idea what I'm talking about. Seriously. Everything is totally gonna be fine. It's definitely not going to be anything that bad. Shit, I didn't mean—"

"I don't want to go back," Gray whispered, his voice cutting through Gajeel's anxious babbling despite its quietness. Everyone fell instantly silent. He lowered his head even further, until he was almost burying his face in Happy's fur. The Exceed watched him with big, worried eyes and rubbed against him soothingly. "I don't want to lose it all again."

"You're not," Natsu said quickly. "We won't let that happen."

"Maybe he's right," Gray said quietly, his voice wavering. "The curse already makes it hard for me to hold on to the memory flashes I get. If it's getting stronger…What's to say that it won't get strong enough to start tearing away the memories I've made since the void too? Maybe it will just take everything away again like it did before. Maybe it will just keep taking things away as quickly as I remember them, resetting me over and over again until there's nothing left to fight for."

No one moved or spoke, just stared at him in stunned horror. Then Lyon suddenly took a few quick steps forward and whacked Gray lightly upside the head. The younger mage jerked back in surprise and blinked at him with wide eyes. Lyon crossed his arms across his chest and scowled at Gray.

"Don't be stupid," the older mage said harshly. "How do you even come up with this nonsense?"

They all stared at him in astonishment, wondering what the hell he was doing. If Natsu looked closely enough, he could see the fear lurking in Lyon's eyes, but the older mage gave no outward sign of it. When he spoke next, his voice was firm and steady with no hint of anxiety, as if he was completely in control of the situation and everyone else was just overreacting.

"Natsu says that the markings went away before, so now we just have to figure out how you managed it the first time," Lyon said calmly. "If they're caused by your magic, then that's great. You can control your magic, and therefore the markings. If they're caused by the curse then you'll have to fight it, but you can do it. You said that the curse was strong today, but it's been strong on other days too and the markings never appeared then. Have you noticed the curse getting  _progressively_ stronger, or is today just a bad day?"

"Bad day," Gray murmured absently, staring at Lyon as if entranced.

Natsu almost wanted to hug the older mage. He'd already noticed the snowball effect that happened once someone started panicking, and Lyon must have too. It must be hard for him since he had to be scared as well, but in staying outwardly calm, he would be better able to calm everyone down and stop the panic from spreading.

"Well, if it hasn't been getting increasingly stronger, then your theory about it growing strong enough to wipe your memory again is a little silly, isn't it?" Lyon asked. Gray blinked at him and nodded slowly. "If the markings are a result of the mixing of the curse and your magic, then that's even better. The mixing of the two is what saved you in the first place, yeah? Sure, weird stuff happened, but ultimately you got some kind of partial immunity against the curse. Plus, you should be able to at least control the part that comes from your magic, and you can fight whatever comes from the curse. Whatever these markings are, you can control them, if we can just figure out how to do it. I know you're worried, but relax. You're in control here."

Gray's eyes took on a dead, flat look. "I'm not in control," he said dully. "I've never been in control. Between you all trying to turn me back into Gray, and Gray's memories trying to make me remember, and the curse fighting to pull it all away…" He shook his head slowly, his expression desolate and lifeless. "Between you and Gray and the curse, I've never had control. I can't even keep up. Everything is fighting over me, pulling me every which way. I don't know who I was, don't even know who I am, and I have no say in the matter. Why should I have control over something now?"

Lyon's calm façade wavered for a moment, and Natsu's hands curled into helpless fists. What a bleak outlook on life. No wonder Gray sometimes seemed so lost and unsure if he was thinking like that.

"I fear that we might have done you a disservice," Lyon said finally, his voice subdued. "We pushed you too hard in one direction in an attempt to achieve our goal of fixing your memory, and sometimes we lost sight of you yourself. It's time for you to take things into your own hands and decide where to go from here. Us, your memory flashes, the curse…We might try to steer you sometimes, but ultimately, you're in charge. You can choose your own path and decide what  _your_ goals are. You are your own person, not just a stand-in for someone we used to know.

"Whatever these markings are, they seem to be a part of you now, and regardless of what caused them, you should be able to learn how to control them. We can sit here and theorize all day, but nothing is going to get done unless you take the initiative to change it. We'll help you however we can, but it's ultimately up to you." Lyon met Gray's gaze steadily. "Now, I'm saying that you're in control. What do  _you_  say?"

Gray was looking at Lyon differently, some strange mix of disbelief and faint awe and the barest flicker of hope. Even though the expressions weren't really the same, Natsu found himself thinking that Gray was starting to look at Lyon a little like how he'd looked at Natsu himself, back in the early days after he'd lost a little of the void apathy. A little like Lyon was something he could hold on to in order to ground himself, something that could provide guidance and maybe a little hope. Natsu hoped that Lyon noticed it, if only because the older mage had been so devastated when Gray had looked at him like a 'screamer'.

"I don't know," Gray whispered. "I've never been any good at it before, but… I feel like I've been so busy trying to run after you and not being able to catch up that I've maybe missed out on some of the things I should have been doing. I don't know if I can really take control of this whole mess, but maybe…Maybe I'll try. Except that I wouldn't even know where to start."

Natsu let out a relieved breath. The whole situation was still worrying, but the fact that Gray was at least willing to try figuring things out was good. As long as Lyon stayed calm and collected and kept the rest of them in line, maybe they'd be able to do something.

"We'll start with the devil slayer magic," Lyon replied decisively. He turned to Natsu. "Can you tell us anything about how he used it during Tartaros or how it worked? The more I know, the easier it will be to figure out how to help him connect to his magic again."

Natsu gathered his thoughts, trying to remember all the details of that fight against Mard Geer. It gave him something to focus on rather than his anxiety of the present situation.

"Well…It was definitely different from his normal magic," the dragon slayer said slowly. "I mean, it  _felt_ different. But even though he was using different spells, it kind of shared some things in common with his normal molding. He was still basically molding things, even if they were different things with different names with different magic. He didn't have the markings when he first started using it, but once he defeated Mard Geer they went away again. Other than that…" He shrugged helplessly. "I don't really know. It was impressive, but we were in the middle of a fight, so I was only paying so much attention."

Lyon nodded thoughtfully. "He was molding with it?"

"Sort of. It wasn't really the same, but I think he made like a sword and a bow, which is kind of something he could do with his normal magic. I think he did a couple things that weren't as close to molding, but a lot of it was."

"That's actually smart," Lyon said in surprise.

"How so?" Lucy asked curiously.

Lyon studied Gray with interest. "Well, this fight with Mard Geer would have had to have been shortly after he picked up this new magic, wherever he got it from, so he probably didn't know enough about it yet to figure out everything it could do. It sounds like he tried to use some of his ice-make techniques with the devil slayer magic, or maybe even combine the two, because he already knew how to do molding and he could use it as a template or guide to help him harness a mostly unknown magic until he could train with it in more depth."

Natsu hadn't really thought about it like that before. Maybe he had just assumed that Gray had picked up the magic and instantly known how to use it, but that seemed a little silly now that he thought about it. It took training to figure out how to use unfamiliar magics effectively, but if Gray had been able to make connections to his normal magic then he might have been able to access at least a portion of the new power.

"That…actually  _is_ pretty clever," Erza admitted thoughtfully.

Lyon nodded and smiled at Gray, although it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Well, I figure we can do the same thing now. Your molding has improved a lot over these past few weeks, and we can use that to try making a link to your devil slayer magic. Once you get a foothold, it will be much easier for you to control it and, by extension, the markings. I don't know enough about the devil slayer magic to really teach you how to use it, but I bet I can help you use molding to bridge the gap."

This was the first time that someone had proposed a concrete plan of action, even if the details were still a little hazy, and it gave everyone something to focus on. Even Gray had perked up a little. He still looked nervous, but Lyon's confidence seemed to be winning him over.

"How can he possibly be so sure of what to do in a situation like this?" Natsu muttered quietly, shaking his head in disbelief as he studied Lyon.

"He's not," Erza replied, keeping her voice low as well. "He has no idea what he's doing and he's not nearly as confident as he's pretending to be. But having a confident leader to look to in a crisis is great for keeping everyone else calm. Confidence can be a contagious thing. Part of being a leader is knowing when to project it even if you aren't really feeling it."

Natsu glanced at Erza sidelong. He supposed she would know what she was talking about. She'd always been the sort of unofficial leader of the team and she had been leading the guild until they could find Jii-chan again, so she had probably engaged in similar tactics before.

Natsu opened his mouth, but paused when Wendy spoke up suddenly.

"Do you think that we should have Porlyusica-san come take a look at him?" she asked nervously, eyeing Gray. "Maybe she could tell if the markings are actually doing anything to him."

Worry suddenly spread across Gray's face again and his grip on Happy tightened slightly. Lyon hurried to intercede.

"No," he said confidently. "Gray is more than capable of handling this on his own and I doubt the markings are hurting him. If we decide we need Porlyusica's help later then we can call her, but let's let Gray try first. I rather think he'll do better than he thinks he will."

"I don't know if she could really do anything," Natsu whispered to Erza, "but wouldn't getting her opinion be good?"

Erza shook her head. "For one, calling in a healer will give credence to the worry that the markings are having adverse effects on Gray, and will put everyone on edge again. More importantly, this is about making Gray believe that he has control over the situation—that he can control something more important than his cabinets or the angle he leaves picture frames at. Bringing Porlyusica in now is sending the message that Gray can't handle this on his own. Think of it like a placebo effect. If Gray believes that he can control the situation then he's more likely to be able to control the situation. If he believes that he has no control, he's unlikely to gain control even if it's possible for him to do so."

"But what if he  _can't_ control it on his own?" Natsu asked softly, worry tying his insides into knots.

"It's a gamble," Erza replied grimly. "A very risky one. If Gray can do it, his confidence should skyrocket and might better equip him to take control of his memories too. If he fails…If he fails then it will just confirm in his mind that there's nothing he can do about the markings or his memory loss or his life in general. It will probably make things even worse than they are now. When Meredy arrives, he won't believe that she'll really be able to help him, because obviously he has no control over getting his memories back. That will make her chances of success negligible.

"It's a huge risk, especially when he already lacks confidence and self-efficacy. If I was calling the shots then I might do things a little differently, but…This is Lyon's call and I'll stand by it. Besides, undermining him now is only going to shake everyone's confidence. I just hope that things work out."

Natsu grimaced, not liking the all-or-nothing vibe Erza's words were giving him. Maybe Gray needed this, but…If it failed then it could be devastating.

"Ready to go out back and try playing with your magic?" Lyon asked Gray, arching an eyebrow and trying to keep his tone light.

Gray hesitated a moment but then nodded. "Okay." He looked down and winced a little, loosening his grip on Happy so that he wasn't squeezing the Exceed so tightly anymore. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Happy wheezed. "Give me another rub and catch me a fish, and we'll call it even."

Despite himself, Gray's lips twitched upwards. "I can do that when I'm done here." He took a quick second to give the Exceed an apologetic scratch behind the ears and then released him to hover in the air. "I'll need my hands for this."

Gray followed Lyon outside, not looking exactly confident, but at least tentatively hopeful. The other guild members filed out back as well, anxious to see how things went. There was a definite air of tension, because if this didn't work, there was no real plan B.

"Alright," Lyon said, crossing his arms over his chest as he went into teacher mode. "The first thing is that you need to be able to sense your magic. You know, when you go to mold something so you have to reach out for your magic? You should be able to feel the devil slayer magic like that too, so look for it in the same way you'd look for your normal magic. I assume it will feel kind of different, so you should know when you find it."

"It should definitely feel different," Natsu remarked. "Trust me, that ice feels really different from his normal ice."

Everyone watched Gray with bated breath, and Lyon tried to keep the anxiety out of his eyes. This might be one of the most nerve-racking parts, because if Gray couldn't find his magic then they couldn't proceed, and it's not like they could find it for him. Gray had never mentioned it up to this point even though he'd become fairly proficient with his molding. Natsu hoped that didn't mean that his connection to it had been damaged. He hadn't even considered that before, but given how it had been fighting with Memento Mori when Gray was first hit with the curse…

Gray just tilted his head curiously. "Oh, is that what that is?" he asked.

Lyon blinked at him in confusion. "What?"

"I knew something felt different," Gray replied. "I just assumed that it was the curse or the markings doing something to my insides."

"Wait, you can already feel it?" Lyon looked lost, as if trying to figure out how this first step had gone so much easier than he had expected it to.

"I think so."

"And you didn't feel it before today?" Erza asked with a frown.

"No."

"That's weird," Lucy said doubtfully.

"It's  _good_ ," Lyon corrected firmly. "It suggests that these markings really are connected to his devil slayer magic, which will make them easier to control."

"Sure, but why are they only appearing now, after all these months?" Lucy asked.

Everyone seemed to be at a loss for that one. Even if Gray had somehow lost his connection to the magic, it shouldn't have just come back for no reason.

"And here I was worried that he'd have a hard time finding it," the dragon slayer said, shaking his head. "Well, good to know his connection to his magic wasn't damaged by the clash with the curse."

Lyon just shrugged helplessly and turned back to instruct Gray on whatever practice he was intending to do, but was interrupted before he could start.

"Maybe it was," Levy said suddenly. "Or if not damaged, exactly, perhaps it's just that his magic was otherwise occupied. The reason he didn't disappear when he was hit by Memento Mori was because his devil slayer magic was fighting the curse. Neither really won, but although the magic saved Gray from dying, the curse ultimately got the upper hand and dragged him into the void. Now that Gray is back from the void and the curse is weaker than it was, it might not be able to suppress his magic anymore.

"I'd guess that his magic wasn't making a strong showing before now either because it was still overpowered by the curse or because it has actually been continuing to fight the curse this whole time and finally got the upper hand. It's kind of a 'chicken or the egg' type thing. Either the curse has been weakening since the void and that gave Gray's magic the chance to reassert itself, or the magic has been weakening the curse itself by continuing to battle it and wear it down. I don't know if anything triggered this sudden resurgence of his magic, but with how much progress he's been making, maybe this was inevitable."

Everyone stared at her and, one by one, their features started lighting up with fragile hope. Natsu really, really wanted to believe that Levy was right, because that meant that they really had been panicking over nothing. Maybe these markings were actually a  _good_ thing. That possibility had never crossed his mind.

Gray frowned faintly. "I don't know. It would be hard to tell if the curse has been getting weaker or stronger over time because it's always fluctuating. Maybe there have been less bad days lately? I don't know."

"Well, whatever it is, we'll worry about it later," Lyon interrupted. "For now we'll focus on controlling the magic and the markings."

Gray nodded, fixing his unwavering gaze on Lyon. It occurred to Natsu that having Gray so dependent on Lyon here might be kind of defeating the purpose of making Gray feel like he was in control, but he supposed that there really wasn't any way around it. As long as Gray figured out his magic in the end, it should be fine.

Natsu had done what he could for now, so he sat back and watched silently, Happy perched on his shoulder. Lyon was trying to explain to Gray how to reach his magic so that he could use it, using molding magic as a parallel example. Despite the fact that Gray could apparently feel the devil slayer magic, he was having a harder time actually getting a grip on it.

"It's slippery," he muttered, his brow furrowed in concentration. "It doesn't like being manipulated, and it's strong. It's going to fight me the whole way."

"Once you master it, it will be a lot easier," Lyon assured him. "It just takes some practice."

Thankfully Gray didn't get frustrated with it. Some of Lyon's calmness must have rubbed off on him, or maybe he just really wanted to be able to control his magic. Whatever the case, his patience was rewarded when he finally figured out how to latch on to his magic a few minutes later. He had a couple missed starts where he found it and then lost it again, apparently because it was too 'slippery', but then he finally managed to hang on and not let it go.

The result was not as expected. His grip quickly slipped again and he lost control, sending formless blasts of ice in all directions. Everyone yelped in surprise and scrambled to get out of the way of the rogue magic.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Gray said. He looked like he might panic again for a second, but then he just frowned, waved his hand, and dispelled the ice. He smiled at the others sheepishly. "Ah, you might want to stand back. I can't control it very well yet."

Everyone was more than happy to stand out of the way, especially Natsu. The dragon slayer had always found the devil slayer ice to be kind of creepy. If it was meant to kill demons then it should be a really great thing to have on their side and Natsu should be happy about it, but he couldn't quite get over his aversion. Maybe he'd get used to it eventually, but for now, he definitely preferred Gray's normal ice-make.

"Wow, that's a lot more powerful than I expected it to be," Lyon said, stunned.

"Yeah, that's why it's kind of hard to control right now," Gray replied, studying his mismatched hands. "Ice-make is more about getting in tune with the ice and coaxing it into helping you. This is more…primal and wild. You have to really force it to do what you want because it's not as compliant. It makes it a lot stronger, but also harder to control."

"Well, we're going to have to try molding it anyway," Lyon said. For a second he seemed a little shaken and worried, but then he shrugged it off and rallied again.

The actual molding turned out to be somewhat of a challenge. Gray's early attempts were clumsy and the products were poorly formed because he was still having trouble figuring out how to manipulate the unfamiliar magic. Lyon had him try molding simple things like shields and swords that Gray could already do easily with his ice-make. Starting Gray on something he was already familiar with seemed like a good technique, but had the unexpected side effect of sometimes causing him to mix up his ice-make and devil slayer magics if his concentration slipped. Lyon would ask him to make a shield, and sometimes he'd accidentally use his normal ice-make and have to try again.

Lyon solved this problem by adding in another element to the training. As well as instructing Gray what to mold, he also had the younger mage switch between his magics until he got used to the differences and could pick out the right one without even thinking about it. Eventually Gray stopped mixing them up and had far fewer misfires where he lost control of the magic and screwed up his molding. He still wasn't as comfortable with the devil slayer magic as he was with his ice-make, but his confidence was clearly growing as he found it easier to manipulate and could mold more complex things.

He was so focused on mastering his magic that he seemed to have forgotten about the markings entirely, but Natsu could tell that Lyon was trying to figure out a way to broach the subject again. Natsu understood Lyon's reluctance to bring it up. Lyon could try to help Gray get a little control over his slayer magic through molding, but the problem was that devil slayer magic just wasn't the same thing as ice-make and obviously had more components than simple molding. Gray had only touched the tip of the iceberg, and he was going to have to figure out the rest of it himself. If the molding lesson hadn't given Gray enough control over his magic to allow him to control the markings on his body, there wasn't much else the others could do for him besides tell him to play around with his magic until he figured something out.

"I think I've got them," Gray said suddenly, before Lyon could work up the nerve to suggest that they try doing something with the markings.

"Got what?" the older mage asked apprehensively.

Gray rocked back on his heels, his eyes unfocused as he concentrated on something only he could feel. "The spells," he said absently. "I think some of the spells are coming back to me."

He confidently slid into a stance, his movements natural and fluid as he drew back one arm as if wielding an invisible bow. A moment later, an impressive-looking bow formed of ice and he let the arrows shoot into the ground. Natsu stared at it, recognizing it from the fight with Mard Geer.

Gray let the ice vanish. "Ice Devil's Zeroth Destruction Bow," he said in satisfaction, looking very pleased with himself. He smirked a little. "I've got a sword too."

A familiar-looking sword formed in his hand for a second before he let it shatter into a hail of ice shards that quickly dissipated. Suddenly he was looking a lot more confident, relaxing into a more comfortable and self-assured stance.

"Those are spells he used when fighting Mard Geer," Natsu said into the resulting silence.

Gray nodded thoughtfully. "I can feel some other ones too. I think I'm finally getting the hang of how to work with this magic. It can do more than molding too."

Lyon smiled at Gray's breakthrough and confidence boost, but then a worried look crept over his face. "Do you want to try, uh…"

"Controlling the markings?" Gray suggested, raising an eyebrow at the older mage. He seemed remarkably unconcerned about the reminder. Lyon nodded. "Give me a second."

Gray's gaze turned inward again and he frowned in concentration. Everyone waited with bated breath, too afraid of wrecking his concentration to speak. After a few seconds, Gray nodded to himself and the black markings vanished. Natsu let out his breath in a whoosh of relief. Gray had done it!

The dragon slayer opened his mouth to congratulate his friend, but the markings suddenly reappeared again, spreading across Gray's skin in an inky wave. Natsu's heart sank like a stone and his mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

"Oh no, I thought you had it," Lucy said in disappointment, worry creasing her features.

Gray looked up at her in surprise, and then smirked a little. The markings vanished again.

"I do," he said. "I was just testing to make sure I had enough control to switch back and forth. I still don't really understand what these things do and I think I'll have to do a lot more work to really control and utilize them properly, but I can work on that."

Lyon smiled widely. "You did it," he said, relief palpable in his voice. "You really did it."

Gray tilted his head thoughtfully. "I did, didn't I?" he asked with a mixture of awe and surprise. "I didn't think I could." He offered Lyon a small smile. "Thank you."

Lyon blinked at Gray in surprise for a second, before ducking his head and smiling at the ground. "No problem. You did all the hard work."

"Did I?" Gray asked, arching an eyebrow and giving Lyon a knowing look. Then he turned to Natsu and Happy and his grin took on a mischievous edge. "Now, I believe that I owe you some fish?" he asked the Exceed teasingly.

Natsu was relieved to see Gray's good mood. Lyon and Erza must have had the right idea—Gray was certainly happy that the markings were gone, but he seemed even more pleased about having been able to finally take control of something in his life.

"Yay, fish!" Happy cheered.

"I was thinking we could go try ice fishing," Gray said cheerfully. "I believe there's a lake just outside town we could use."

"Ice fishing?" Natsu asked skeptically. "Where are you going to find ice at this time of year?"

Gray gave him a disbelieving look. "Um, ice magic?" he suggested dryly.

Natsu was unconvinced. "Have you ever been ice fishing before?"

"I don't think so…" Gray replied, getting a lost look as he searched through his broken memory. Then he shook his head firmly. "No,  _I_ haven't. But hey, I figure that I'll make it up as I go along. I've been getting pretty good at that."

"Fish is fish," Happy said with a shrug. "Natsu can deal with a little ice."

Gray grinned and grabbed Lyon's arm, tugging the startled man along with him as he started towards the dragon slayer and his Exceed. Natsu's eyebrows rose fractionally. Gray didn't usually shy away from physical contact, but he rarely initiated it either. Funny, but it reminded Natsu of how he had hung on to Gray's blackened arm earlier to show that he wasn't uncomfortable with the change. Here it would be a nice symbolic gesture given how uncomfortable Gray had been with Lyon before, but it was probably a coincidence. Then again, Gray had always been a lot more clever than he'd let on, so who knew?

"We'll catch lots of fish," Gray said, giving Lyon a conspiratorial smile. The older ice mage smiled back hesitantly. "Who knows? Maybe we'll catch enough for the whole guild, hm? Fish for everyone." He laughed, but then paused and turned to look at Lucy and Erza. "Of course, if we want to catch that many fish, we might need a little help…"

The girls exchanged looks and then smiled. Natsu bounced on his heels excitedly. He was still a little doubtful about this endeavor, but it would be worth it to have the team together again.

As Gray walked past Gajeel, he paused for a half-second to give the dragon slayer a reassuring smile. "It's okay," he said, before moving on. Joining Natsu and the others, he turned back around to give the assembled guild members a cheery wave. "We'll be back in a few hours."

"Don't worry about bringing fish with you," Cana muttered, making a face. It still couldn't cover up her intense relief at how the situation had been resolved, and everyone else was in much better spirits as well.

Gray laughed and gave them one last wave before releasing Lyon's arm and making a beeline for the edge of the city. The group followed him as he wove his way through the streets confidently.

"What did your guild want?" Gray asked Lyon as they walked.

The older mage scowled, suddenly indignant again. "You won't believe the stuff I have to put up with. Toby shows up all panicked and crying everywhere and I can't make heads or tails of what he's trying to say, so I have to follow him all the way back to Lamia Scale to find out what's wrong. It turns out that he was upset because he lost one of his socks again. Seriously. And I was literally just at the guild a few days ago and it wasn't a problem then, and he dragged me all the way out there over a missing sock. And guess where it was?"

"In his kitchen cabinet?" Natsu suggested.

"You're the only one who stores socks in your cabinets," Lucy said, shaking her head.

"Technically, we don't  _store_ them there…"

"It wasn't in his kitchen," Lyon interrupted, rolling his eyes.

"Around his neck?" Gray offered.

Lyon started in surprise and stared at him. "How did you know?"

Gray shrugged. "Isn't that what happened last time, during the Grand Magic Games?" The reemergence of the memory didn't seem to bother him. "Hm…I'm wondering if I should write that down, but somehow I doubt that knowledge will ever be relevant again."

Lyon snorted out a laugh. "Probably not."

He complained about the hassle of getting called back to his guild for such a stupid reason for a couple more minutes, before Lucy and Erza rolled their eyes and started their own conversation. Natsu was content to just listen to the rant and take enjoyment from watching Lyon's indignation and Gray's amusement, but then another thought occurred to him and he turned to Gray suddenly.

"Is the curse still bothering you?" he asked, interrupting Lyon.

Gray tilted his head slightly as if listening for something, and then shook his head. "Nah. It's not something I can control like my magic, but I think that in all the excitement I stopped paying attention to it and it gave up. Or maybe it was because I was around the guild. It's easier to keep myself grounded when I'm with you guys."

Natsu sighed in relief. "That's good."

Gray nodded thoughtfully and snatched Happy out of the air from where he was hovering nearby. The Exceed yelped in surprise, but quickly settled down once he realized that Gray was just giving him the apology scratch he'd been promised.

"You know, I think I'm ready now, for this newest scheme of yours to try fixing some of my memory," Gray remarked. "As ready as I'll ever be, anyway. Maybe I wasn't before, but…I managed to do this, didn't I? Maybe I can at least try."

Natsu smiled. Apparently Erza had been right about that too. Gray had been apprehensive about this plan with Meredy even though he'd agreed to it, but today's success seemed to have given him more confidence. Before he had agreed to it because he had trusted Natsu. Maybe now he was finally learning how to trust himself too.

When they finally reached the lake, Gray released Happy and easily froze the surface of the water in a layer of shimmering ice. Thankfully it was from his normal ice-make and not that creepy devil slayer stuff.

Surveying his handiwork, Gray nodded in satisfaction. "Great. Now we can go pick a spot out in the middle of the lake and cut a hole."

"And what are we supposed to be fishing with, exactly?" Erza asked, arching an eyebrow. "Maybe we should find some poles first."

"We're improvising," Gray said cheerfully.

"I guess we could just drop Happy down the hole and have him go catch some fish for us," Lucy said, her eyes twinkling with mischief.

"Hey!" the Exceed protested.

However, it was something else Gray had said that had caught Natsu's attention.

"Wait, in the  _middle_ of the lake?" the dragon slayer burst out. "You expect me to walk out over all that ice?" He shuddered. "What if it breaks and I fall in? Or if you decide to mess with me and drop me in for fun? I don't want to be anywhere near all that cold water."

Gray studied him for a moment, tilting his head slightly as he watched the dragon slayer with unreadable eyes. "Well, I suppose you'll just have to trust me then, won't you?" he said finally.

Natsu stared at him. Maybe Gray had a point. Gray had learned how to trust Natsu and probably some of the others as well, and it looked like he might finally be starting to learn how to trust himself. Maybe it was time that Natsu and the others learned how to trust him too.

Nodding slowly, Natsu stepped out onto the frozen surface of the lake.

Gray smiled.

The ice held

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, so that was basically just a bunch of nonsense I threw together in the last few days. The original thought was about what would happen if Gray's markings randomly showed up (since in canon they started showing up randomly during the post-Tartaros time skip until Gray figured out how to control them). I thought it was a good idea, but I had to make up a bunch of stuff because I kind of changed how the devil slayer magic and curse worked in order to justify the overarching plot of the story. Also, have some subtle-not-so-subtle E.N.D. references for the fun of it and pointless fluff to make up for the train wreck that will be the next chapter : )
> 
> And although the cliffie on the last chapter was kind of intentionally misleading, I only said that "something else showed up". Technically this is true, even if it seemed like it should be a person or something in the context it was given.


	23. Ch 22-Gray teaches Natsu how to let go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prepare yourselves.

* * *

**Chapter 22**

_(In which Gray tries to teach Natsu how to let go.)_

* * *

Thankfully, Gray's new confidence in himself seemed to stick, which made everyone more optimistic about what might happen when Meredy showed up. That wasn't to say that things were perfect and everyone was sure that this would be the breakthrough they'd been looking for. Confidence only went so far, and Gray was just as aware of that as the rest of them. He was still obviously nervous about the upcoming challenge, although he tried to hide it, and the longer they had to wait, the more antsy he got. Things were certainly much better than they had been, but there was definitely some growing tension as the days dragged on.

So when Meredy and Jellal finally arrived a few days later, everyone was both intensely relieved and terribly nervous. And as much as they didn't want to get their hopes up, they couldn't help but be cautiously hopeful and excited as well. The two mages were hurriedly ushered into the guild and assaulted with a flurry of questions and excited explanations of what had happened while they were gone.

Gray's eyes narrowed slightly as he looked Jellal up and down, and then he hurriedly scribbled something in his notebook.

Natsu raised an eyebrow. "Whatcha remembering this time?" he asked curiously.

"I don't think Gray liked him very much," the ice mage replied.

Jellal glanced over with a faint frown. "He talks about himself in the third person?"

Gray gave him a wary look and didn't respond, so Natsu answered instead.

"Sometimes," the dragon slayer said. "He still doesn't feel very connected to who he was, so sometimes when he talks about the past he talks about it like it happened to someone else."

Jellal hummed thoughtfully, still eyeing Gray. "Well, you're kind of right," he told the ice mage. "You didn't much like me in the beginning, for justifiable reasons. I don't know how much that changed, but you eventually learned to tolerate me."

Gray's brow furrowed in thought. "Because of Erza?" he suggested uncertainly.

Jellal's eyebrows shot upwards and he looked faintly surprised. "Maybe so," he replied.

Erza moved to stand near Jellal, although she too was watching Gray curiously. Gray glanced back and forth between them for a moment before shrugging.

"If she likes you now then I guess it's okay," he muttered, half to himself.

Jellal and Erza exchanged puzzled glances, before Natsu hurriedly stepped in. Thankfully Jellal didn't seem upset by the assertion, but the dragon slayer would rather steer them clear of this situation anyway. Better safe than sorry—there was no point in ruffling anyone's feathers right now. Besides, he was impatient to get down to business.

"Okay then, Meredy, wanna try another sensory link?" he asked cheerfully.

The pink-haired girl glanced around nervously. "The last two times I did this, it didn't work," she said quietly. "I want to help, but I seem to have just made a mess each time."

Natsu shook his head. "You didn't," he disagreed. "Sure, it wasn't perfect, but your magic is one of the only ways we've really been able to connect with him so far. It's the only reason we could find him in the first place, the only way we could get him out of the void, and apparently the thing that finally triggered a breakthrough and helped him start remembering and feeling again. You've done a lot of good, Meredy. Don't sell yourself short."

She still looked uncertain, but relaxed a little at his words. Natsu felt a little bad that she seemed so insecure over what she'd been able to do with her magic. He supposed he couldn't really blame her since it had always gotten dramatic results and sometimes ended with Gray curled up in an incoherent ball on the ground.

Meredy suddenly stiffened again, her eyes sliding to the side. Natsu frowned a little and followed her gaze, to see that Gray had stepped up beside him. Meredy and Gray stared at each other for a moment. The girl twisted her hands together uncomfortably and looked more than a little nervous. Natsu supposed that it must be because Gray hadn't exactly warmed up to her before she had left. For his part, Gray also looked uncomfortable, but it looked like a slightly different type of discomfort than that which had shown around the 'screamers' when he had first returned from the void. Not that Natsu could put his finger on what exactly that difference might be.

Gray glanced around nervously before finally making his eyes fix on Meredy's face. He looked a little uncertain, but also a little sad and perhaps a little remorseful.

"Hello again, Meredy," he said finally, the name awkward in his mouth.

Natsu raised an eyebrow. Although Gray had started occasionally using names for other situations as well, he still usually only used someone's name when they were unhappy or when he was trying to apologize for something. The dragon slayer wondered if Gray felt a little bad about how he had acted around Meredy after the void.

Meredy blinked in surprise. "Um, hi Gray," she replied hesitantly.

Gray stared at her for a second longer before offering her a hesitant smile. When she got over her shock, she relaxed a little and smiled back.

"Well, let's get started," Lyon said impatiently, interrupting the moment. He glanced over at Natsu. "Do you even know what you're going to do?"

Natsu smiled sheepishly. "Not really," he admitted. "This time Gray's the one who's going to have to figure out what to do. I'm just going to sit back and try to give him what he asks for."

"You want to be the one I link him to again?" Meredy asked him, doubt flickering in her eyes. Natsu supposed he couldn't blame her for being concerned after how badly he had screwed up last time.

"Yes," Gray answered firmly, before Natsu had a chance to respond.

There was a brief pause.

"Do  _you_ know what you're going to do?" Lyon asked.

If Natsu had to guess, he'd say that his smile had looked just as sheepish as Gray's did now.

"No," Gray replied ruefully. "But I'll try. And I brought some stuff to maybe help a little bit."

He hugged the notebook and sketchpad to his chest tightly, as if he was afraid that they'd slip away if he wasn't careful. The others recognized the notebook, but Natsu noticed a few curious glances directed towards the sketchbook. Gray hadn't shown them that yet.

"Well, I'll go ahead and create the link," Meredy said.

Gray and Natsu both nodded, and Meredy's magic flared up around them for a moment. It took Natsu several seconds to adjust to the feeling. Being linked to someone else was a strange sensation. It was odd to be able to feel what someone else was feeling, and sometimes it was a little difficult to puzzle out exactly what those foreign sensations meant. But the link told Natsu that Gray was calm enough and a little eager and cautiously hopeful, which seemed like a promising mix.

"I thought we might start with the people," Gray said, looking over at Natsu.

"In what way?" the dragon slayer asked uncertainly.

"You know how I told you that I have a hard time connecting the people I know now and my memories of them into a meaningful whole? I thought I might try looking for links there first. You know, start small and work my way up," Gray explained slowly.

Natsu shrugged. It's not like he had a better idea. "Go for it."

Everyone gathered around to watch in silent anticipation as Gray and Natsu sat down at one of the tables and worked. To be honest, it was hard to tell whether or not much of anything they did was having an effect on Gray, but they worked at it for quite a while. Gray started by picking a single person and then going through what he knew about them, searching for any new memories and emotions that connected to them, and sometimes turning to study the notebook for clues. Natsu and the others supplied him with additional memories and facts when he asked for them, and Natsu also fed him relevant emotions to go along with the memories in the hopes that something would click.

Once or twice Natsu thought that for just a second something seemed to slide into place, but Gray always seemed to lose it as soon as he found it. The dragon slayer could feel Gray's frustration growing. Natsu didn't want to admit defeat, but he was starting to think that they were pursuing another dead end. He was about to suggest that they maybe try a different approach when Gray let out a frustrated breath and shoved the notebook away.

"It's not working," the ice mage muttered, his dark eyes narrowed in irritation. "Every time I think something is starting to make sense, it slips away again."

His eyes caught on the other book lying off to the side, and he hurriedly grabbed it and slid it in front of him on the table's wooden surface. Opening the sketchbook, he began flipping through the pages, studying the different people carefully as if he could find the answers there.

"What's that?" Lucy whispered curiously, bending in to peer over Gray's shoulder.

Natsu was too busy watching Gray to really answer her. Whenever he felt any kind of emotion coming through the link—whatever brief memories and feelings the pictures were giving Gray—he tried to augment them with some of his own. Gray didn't comment, but Natsu could tell that it wasn't doing a whole lot of good at this point.

And then suddenly Gray paused, his eyes narrowing even further as he studied the picture in front of him. Natsu felt a flash of recognition and a quick stab of something like pain and grief and guilt.

"It's her," Gray murmured, almost as if in a trance. He didn't seem to be aware of the rest of them anymore. "The one I killed."

Natsu didn't have to look at the drawing to know that it must be of Ur. Somewhere behind him, he heard Lyon suck in a sharp breath.

"You didn't kill her," the older ice mage said harshly.

Natsu automatically looked over at him, briefly startled by the vehement response. Lyon's mouth was set in a grim line and his hands were clenched at his sides, but he looked more pained than angry. His words seemed to snap Gray out of his daze as well, and the younger mage glanced over at Lyon. Gray stared at him blankly for a moment, and Natsu could feel all his emotions draining away as quickly as they had come.

Gray shrugged. "I wouldn't know," he said with a sigh. "But he must have thought differently."

Natsu grimaced and Lyon's eyes clouded over. Neither of them could be terribly surprised by the assertion, but it didn't offer any comfort. Natsu knew that on some level Gray had always blamed himself for what happened to his master, but that didn't mean that the dragon slayer had to like it.

"Yeah, well you could be an idiot sometimes," Lyon said in a low voice.

Gray blinked at him for a moment and then smiled a little sadly. "I wouldn't know," he repeated wistfully. Natsu could feel his melancholy.

Then Gray turned his attention back to the drawing of Ur. He tapped a finger against it thoughtfully and his brow crinkled slightly in concentration. Suddenly Natsu could feel a burst of feverish energy through the link, and Gray's eyes took on a frenzied intensity as he abruptly ripped the page out of the book and began hastily flipping through the other pages, frantically searching for something. Natsu opened his mouth to ask Gray what he thought he was doing, but the ice mage wasn't paying any attention.

The frantic energy coming off Gray didn't wane, and he barely even paused when he found what he was looking for. He hurriedly tore another page out and held the two drawings side by side, looking back and forth between them.

"They're the same," he said. "But they're also different."

Natsu frowned as he realized that the other page that had caught Gray's interest was the scene from Galuna Island, the one Gray had written all over the other day. Gray produced a pen out of nowhere and hastily circled the phrase  _'Oh God, Ur, I'm sorry'._ Then he wrote  _'iced shell'_  next to it and leaned back a little to survey his handiwork.

Natsu stared at it for a moment and then looked over at Lyon, who looked as sickened and stunned as the dragon slayer felt. He had been hoping that Gray would make some connections today, but this would not have been his first choice of where to start.

"I don't get it," Gray grumbled, scowling at the pictures. "For a second I thought…" He sighed irritably. "I don't know. But…" He bit his lip thoughtfully. "I've always been good at organizing things," he murmured, half to himself. "Why can't I organize this so that it makes sense? Unless…"

That feverish determination was back again and before Natsu could say anything, Gray had suddenly swiped the notebook and sketchpad off the table and fallen to his knees on the floor. The dragon slayer made a startled sound at the unexpected movement, but Gray wasn't interested in anything besides the pictures. He had begun frantically flipping through the sketchbook and ripping out page after page. Everyone took a few steps back to form a loose circle around him as he spread the pictures out across the floor. Natsu frowned, but quickly saw that Gray wasn't doing this as haphazardly as it first appeared. He was actually arranging the pictures into groups.

Some of the pictures Gray seemed to have little interest in, and these he either left in the book or threw off to the side and didn't look at again. Most of these were of people Natsu didn't recognize or of people that played only very minor roles in Gray's pre-void life. The rest of the pictures were loosely categorized into groups. There were several drawings of a middle-aged couple that looked a lot like Gray, who Natsu assumed were the ice mage's parents. The man gave Natsu pause, because he looked an awful lot like that Silver guy they had fought with during Tartaros. He wanted to ask Gray but restrained himself, because he knew that his friend wouldn't know.

The next group contained pictures of Ur and Lyon, sometimes with Gray himself included. The third group was for Fairy Tail. It had a few pictures of all the Fairy Tail members together in group shots, plus a whole bunch of random drawings of different people. The pictures of Team Natsu, both group pictures and individual shots, were close enough to this group to show that they belonged with it, but also a little off to the side in their own separate sphere.

Gray sorted through them all quickly and efficiently until he reached the end of the book. Then he sat back on his heels and studied the groups he had made.

A few of the watching mages were making comments and asking questions, but they kept their voices low, as if afraid to disturb Gray. Natsu didn't pay them much mind, but his keen hearing could pick up on such questions like "what is he doing?", "did he make all those?", and "is it working?" He could have probably answered some of those questions, but he was too focused on Gray to bother.

The ice mage had paused and was frowning at the group of pictures focusing on his parents. He gingerly picked one of the pages up and peered at it intently, pressing his finger against the representation of his father.

"They died, didn't they?" he asked with a frown.

Lyon swallowed. "Yes."

"When Gray was a child?"

"Yes."

"Then why…?" Gray's frown deepened. "Why do I have more memories of him?"

"What do you mean?" Natsu asked, puzzled.

"There are demons," Gray said, his voice sounding like it came from miles away. "But he isn't one, not really. There was a…necromancer?" His eyes widened as things started falling into place. "Yes. He should have been dead,  _was_ dead, but the necromancer brought him back, didn't he? That's where I got the magic from—the devil slayer magic. He gave it to me and then he was gone again."

Natsu stared at him, his mouth working soundlessly as he put the pieces together. That Silver guy who had smelled so much like Gray…

"Juvia is sorry!" Juvia wailed suddenly, burying her face in her hands. "Juvia killed the necromancer. She killed Gray-sama's father."

Everyone gaped at her, and anyone who hadn't quite made the connection was making it now. Gray's head jerked up so that he could look at Juvia too, and his eyes softened a little even though they looked sad. Through the sensory link, Natsu could feel a bone-crushing guilt and sadness.

"It's not your fault," he said quietly. "He was already dead. Besides…He was my father and it was my responsibility to take care of it. You shouldn't have had to worry about it in the first place. It's my fault because even after I defeated him, even after I threw a metal ball through his chest and left a gaping hole there, I couldn't make myself just give the killing blow. I should have, but I couldn't."

Natsu opened his mouth, but Gray's eyes widened slightly and he cursed under his breath.

"Shit, I'm losing it again."

Natsu winced, because he could feel what Gray was talking about. He could feel all of that pain and anguish seeping away as the memory began slipping out of Gray's grasp. Natsu grimaced and did what he could. He tried to feel what Gray had been feeling and push it through the link so that maybe it would give the ice mage some traction to hold on to the memory. He used what was left over of Gray's emotions and supplemented it with his own feelings from Igneel's death—God, he and Gray had both lost their fathers, both undergone that same kind of pain, and Natsu hadn't even known it because he had been so blinded by his own grief that he had just  _left_ —but it wasn't enough. Soon he could tell that whatever Gray had been feeling was well and truly gone, and only Natsu's emotions were left bouncing across the link.

"Stop," Gray said dully, waving Natsu off. "It's gone."

Natsu grimaced and tried to reign in his out-of-control emotions, although he couldn't entirely get rid of all the guilt and grief.

"Funny," Gray added flatly, staring at the picture of his parents with a dead expression. "It seems like we just keep dying and coming back. But I guess he must have known what I know: even if something can drag you back out of death, you'll never be the same. Some parts of you will be different, some will be missing entirely, and some…Some will always stay dead."

Natsu hissed out a breath. "Gray—"

Gray shook his head sharply and placed the drawing he was holding back into the group he had taken it from. "It's too late," he said, his voice suddenly more matter-of-fact and businesslike than emotionally dead. "I'll have to try a different approach. Hmm…"

"Gray—"

"Shh," Gray murmured absently, engrossed with the pictures again.

Natsu bit down on his tongue to stop himself from speaking and distracting Gray. He felt like he needed to say something—something comforting, maybe—but he didn't know what. And he wasn't sure that Gray would necessarily want to hear that now anyway, not when the memory he had recovered now felt like it belonged to someone else rather than himself. Instead, Natsu chewed on his lip and watched his friend silently.

Gray's eyes were darting from group to group, his lips drawn downwards in a frown as he studied each set of pictures. His newfound calm and detachment was quickly fraying and vanishing, and Natsu could feel his frustration and fear growing.

"What do they all have in common?" Gray muttered to himself. "What's the missing link?" Then he suddenly turned and fixed Natsu with a piercing stare. "When you look at these people, what do you feel?" he asked, pointing to the group containing pictures of Fairy Tail's members, apparently deciding that if he couldn't figure out the other two groups then he might as well try this one. "What do they mean to you?" He scowled slightly. "What did they mean to me?"

Natsu looked at him sadly for a moment before bending over to look at the pictures more closely. They stirred up a mix of emotions, from love to protectiveness to pride, but he thought that Gray perhaps needed something more from him. Something cohesive. Gray had already said that he could feel the emotions drawn into these pictures—and maybe that's why he was having more success with them than with the notebook—so it wouldn't do any good for Natsu to just rehash a mix of random emotions. He needed to fit them all together into something more meaningful.

What did Fairy Tail mean to him? It meant laughter and fun times and friendship. Even more than that, it meant family. It meant home. It might have been a crazy guild with a lot of crazy people, but it was where Natsu belonged, and he wouldn't trade it for the world.

"Yes…" Gray said slowly.

Natsu glanced over at him. Gray was nodding slowly as his eyes drifted over the pictures. Natsu couldn't say exactly what it was, but through the link it almost felt like something had clicked, like some kind of connection had been made. He could also feel a sense of love and fierce caring that was definitely stronger and more personal than anything Gray had been feeling up to this point. At first he thought it was just his own emotions reflecting back at him across the link, like it had been in the void where apparently Gray hadn't felt anything at all but was just reflecting Natsu's emotions back, but it felt a little different. It didn't exactly feel like his emotions, but like a slightly different version of them.

Maybe Gray's version.

Natsu looked at his friend hopefully, wondering if they were finally getting somewhere. "Gray, do you—?"

"Maybe," Gray interrupted.

Natsu didn't press him because he could tell that Gray was on to something and didn't want to be distracted. The dragon slayer tried to figure out what that something might be from the emotions coming through the link, but it was a hopeless endeavor. There was some confusion and frustration, some of that love and protectiveness, and that almost desperate, frenzied sensation had returned again.

Gray's eyes darted from one group of pictures to the next, and he muttered to himself under his breath. "What they have in common…What connects them…What is it…?" Then his frenzied energy suddenly stilled, his eyes widened almost comically, and for a moment he seemed frozen in place. "Oh," he said finally.

Something clicked into place with a resounding echo, and Gray suddenly pitched forward. He managed to stop himself from smashing his face into the floor by breaking his fall with his arms, but remained motionless, his head bowed and curtained by his hair. Everyone went into panic mode, hurriedly stepping in closer and worriedly asking if Gray was alright. For his part, Natsu sucked in a sharp breath and reeled backward, the backs of his knees slamming into the wooden bench behind him, and he hurriedly sat down on it as he shook his head to clear it.

"Are you okay, Natsu?" Happy asked in concern. "What's happening?"

What indeed. Something had clicked, something had connected. The link was awash with a chaotic storm of emotion, and Natsu thought that the reason Gray wasn't yet moving was because he was trying to process and sort through all the new information. Whatever had happened, it had left Gray with an overwhelming amount of emotion and information and maybe, just maybe, memory. The maelstrom began to subside and, although there was still some confusion and some rough edges that didn't seem to quite match up, in its place was something that felt suspiciously similar to how Natsu suspected Gray might have normally felt, before the void. He could feel the difference, even if he couldn't say what exactly had changed. There was definitely a different quality now though. Before he had been connected to someone with few memories, who was and wasn't Gray at the same time. Now…

"Gray?" Natsu asked, the sudden wavering hope in his voice immediately catching everyone's attention and making them fall silent. "Are you…?"

For a moment, no one moved. Then, ever so slowly, Gray lifted his head and looked over at Natsu. The dragon slayer felt his breath catch, because those were  _Gray's_ eyes.

"Hey, flame brain," Gray said, offering him a tired smile. "Long time no see."

Everyone began talking at once.

"Does he remember?"

"Gray, do you remember me?"

"What's happening?"

Natsu stared at Gray speechlessly, too shocked and elated to move. The ice mage picked himself up off the floor and glanced around at everyone.

"Hey, guys," he said.

More than one person burst into tears. Juvia threw herself at Gray, forcing him to stagger back a couple paces as she sobbed all over him and he awkwardly wrapped an arm around her. He was smiling and greeting everyone over Juvia's head as casually as if he had just returned from a long job or something. Part of Natsu was aching to run over there and join in the fray, but something stopped him.

Even though Gray was smiling, even though he seemed to have regained his memories, something seemed off. Maybe it was the fact that he seemed to be trying to say something but couldn't seem to get a word in edgewise around everyone's excited chatter. Maybe it was that there was something lurking in his dark eyes and behind his ready smile that seemed a little pained, a little sad. Mostly it was because Natsu could feel Gray's emotions through the link, and even though his friend  _was_ happy and excited, he was also sad and scared. Natsu didn't know what was bothering him, but something was up.

"Is something wrong?" Natsu asked worriedly.

His voice wasn't that loud, but it seemed to cut through the celebrations. Everyone looked over at him, most with puzzled frowns on their faces. Gray looked at him as well, his lips tightening slightly.

"Why would anything be wrong?" Juvia asked uncertainly. "Gray-sama remembers everything, right?"

Gray let out a breath and gently detached Juvia from where she was wrapped around him. His eyes swept over his gathered friends and he smiled sadly. "Yes," he replied. "I remember."

"See?" Juvia said happily. "Nothing is wrong."

Something flashed in Gray's eyes and he looked away. "It's not over," he said quietly.

There was a long, heavy pause.

"What do you mean?" Lyon asked finally, his elation melting into something resembling fear.

Gray closed his eyes briefly before taking a deep breath to steady himself. "At this moment, I remember," he told them. "But in a few minutes, I might not."

"Why wouldn't you?" Lucy asked. "How could you forget again so quickly?"

"Right now the reason I can connect everything together, the reason I can remember, is because I'm linked to Natsu," Gray explained in a low voice. "His emotions and sensations are what helped me make the connections I needed to make in order to remember. Right now everything is aligned, but that knowledge is built on the foundation of Natsu's emotions and experiences, not mine. Once I'm not linked to him anymore…"

He trailed off and stared at the floor. Natsu felt sick, and no one else looked much better.

"Gray…" someone whispered.

The ice mage looked back up and smiled widely. "But I'm here right now, yeah? It's not so bad."

No one seemed very reassured, but Gray kept the smile in place anyway. He glanced back at the floor and sighed.

"Aw hell, what was I thinking, ripping it all up?" he asked ruefully, bending down to start picking up all the scattered drawings. "Now I'm going to have to find a folder or something for them." He paused and looked back up at the others thoughtfully. "Unless…"

He straightened up and shuffled through a handful of papers. Selecting one, he stepped towards Lyon and offered it to him. The older mage hesitated for a moment before carefully taking it from him and looking at it. It was a drawing of Ur along with Gray and Lyon as children. They were all smiling and laughing in the picture, but it made Lyon's eyes fill with tears.

"Sorry I was such a jerk," Gray said, giving him a crooked smile.

Lyon let out a strangled laugh. "It's not your fault," he choked out.

Gray's smile turned a little sad at the edges, and he leaned forward to hug his adoptive brother. Lyon looked startled for a second before he hugged Gray back.

"Your hot chocolate still sucks," Gray said into the other mage's chest, his voice slightly muffled by the fabric of his shirt. Lyon drew back in surprise and blinked at him uncomprehendingly. Gray grinned impishly. "And your snowball fighting skills have deteriorated with age. Although I was always better from the beginning."

Lyon laughed breathlessly. "You wish," he said. "And my hot chocolate is fantastic."

"No, it's not," Gray countered, his smile softening. "But I forgive you anyway, because you've always been a good brother in all other respects."

Lyon's eyes misted over again. "Gray…"

"It's okay," Gray said quietly. "I know." He bit his lip. "However I might have looked at you in the beginning, however unintentionally cruel I might have been…I still care. About you. Things are different, but even without my memories, I've learned how to care again. Thank you for everything you've done, Lyon. It means a lot."

"I care too," the older mage whispered. "I've always cared. Gray—"

Gray smiled. "I know, Lyon," he interrupted. "I've always known." His smile took on a teasing edge again, which didn't belong there given the gravity of the present situation. "Hey, remind me to show you how to make hot chocolate properly some time. I can still do that, memories or no." When a few more tears starting working their way down Lyon's face, Gray sighed softly again. "It'll be alright."

Then he turned away, leaving Lyon with a heartbroken look on his face as the older man clutched the drawing tightly and stared after him. Natsu watched numbly as Gray slowly made his way around the circle of guild members, giving them each a relevant drawing, a hug, and some parting words and gentle teasing that sounded too much like goodbyes for the dragon slayer's taste. Gray kept a smile on his face the whole time, trying to put the others at ease, but he didn't spend long with each person. Despite his calm exterior, he was in something of a hurry, as if he was worried that he was running out of time.

Still, he took the time to tease Lucy about the stories she had been showing him and encourage her to keep writing, to comfort Juvia and hold her as she cried, to wipe away Erza's tears and thank her for holding the guild together. He managed to startle a strangled laugh out of Loke with his teasing, whispered some words of comfort to Cana, and petted Happy soothingly. Everyone got something, regardless of how close they had been to Gray before all this.

When he had finished his parting ritual, he took a step back and looked around at all the assembled faces for anyone he had missed. His gaze caught on Meredy and Jellal, and he frowned thoughtfully. He bent down to pick up the ravaged sketchbook that was still lying on the floor. Flipping through the few remaining pictures that he had ignored in his frantic rush to tear everything out and organize it, he paused on one in particular and carefully detached it from the binding.

"I wasn't very nice to you either, huh?" he said with a sheepish smile, handing the drawing to Meredy.

She took it gingerly and a few stray tears slipped down her cheeks as she studied the drawing of her, Ultear, and Jellal. "It's okay," she whispered. "I'm—I'm sorry that I couldn't do more."

"Hey, it's alright," Gray said gently, carefully wiping her tears away with his thumb. "It's not your fault that things didn't really work out the way we wanted them to. Besides, it's only with your help that I can say hi to everyone again. So thank you for that."

She tried to smile. "You're welcome," she managed.

Gray glanced over at Jellal and eyed him up and down for a second. "I did warm up to you eventually," he said finally, presumably in response to his amnesic self's earlier assertion that he hadn't liked the man. Jellal blinked in surprise. "But if you hurt Erza again, you know that I'll have to kill you," Gray added with a crooked grin. He was only half joking.

Jellal stared at him for a moment before glancing over at Erza. "Understood," he replied quietly.

Gray seemed to have lost interest in him again already, having followed Jellal's gaze to look at Erza once more. He smiled at her, although it was a little sad.

"Don't cry for me, Erza," he said gently. "If you're going to insist on crying over something, pick something better to waste your tears on."

She sniffled and wiped at her face to get rid of the tears streaking it. "If I have to cry over anything, this seems like an appropriate situation," she answered, her voice wavering dangerously.

"Not for me," he repeated. "Don't do it for me."

Then he turned away, as if realizing that there was really nothing more he could do for her. His gaze finally fixed on Natsu again, and he walked over to the dragon slayer. Natsu watched his approach silently, still too stunned and numb to offer anything. He had watched Gray interact with the others, but he had felt too sad and heavy to really say anything himself.

Gray paused in front of him and leafed through his sheaf of papers for a moment. Withdrawing one, he handed it to Natsu and then stepped back as the dragon slayer took it and looked down at it. It was a drawing of Gray and Natsu laughing, clearly in the middle of their infamous banter, the rest of the team off in the background. Natsu swallowed hard and stared at it for several long seconds, willing himself not to cry.

Looking up, he saw that Gray was watching him with a slightly wary expression. Natsu supposed that he was waiting to see if the dragon slayer would make fun of it after all. Maybe in the past Natsu would have done it, but he couldn't see anything here to tease about now.

"It's beautiful," he said quietly.

Gray smiled at him crookedly. "By the way, flame brain," he said, "I use molding magic, in case you've forgotten. I don't need a key to get into my apartment. I can just remake a key out of ice every time. The spare is only there in case someone else needs to get in when I'm not there."

Natsu stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment. He half wanted to laugh because that was such a stupid, random thing to say, but he didn't feel like this was a laughing matter, even if Gray was trying to pretend like it was. That grin on Gray's face suddenly bothered Natsu a lot more.

"Stop smiling at me like that," the dragon slayer said flatly.

Gray blinked at him. "Why?"

"Did you forget that we're sense-linked? I can feel what you feel. Why are you so scared?" Natsu demanded.

Because although Gray had kept that stupid smile pasted on as he talked to everyone, Natsu could feel his fear and sadness seeping through the link. Gray might be trying to put on a brave face for everyone else, but Natsu wasn't having it.

Gray hesitated for a moment and then let his smile melt away. He sighed heavily and studied Natsu with sad, tired eyes.

"It's not easy on me either, you know," the ice mage said quietly. "Yeah, it's a little scary knowing that I'm going to lose all of this again, that I'm going to be thrown back into a world where nothing makes sense and I don't even know myself. But really, what do you want me to do, Natsu? Cry? Scream? Rage at the world? I could do all of that, but what good would it do? This could be my last chance, Natsu. I'd rather spend it smiling."

Natsu's heart twisted painfully and he clenched his hands into fists, his fingernails pressing into his palms. "It's not your last chance," he snapped. "It's not. You can't give up now, not when we're so close. This is kind of a success. We can build off of this, and then we'll get you back for good again."

Gray let out his breath in a soft sigh. "Natsu," he said softly, "it's time to let go."

The dragon slayer could swear that his heart stopped, because he couldn't believe what Gray was saying. It sounded too much like his friend was giving up.

"Breathe, Natsu," Gray told him.

The dragon slayer obediently sucked in a breath. Maybe his heart hadn't stopped, but apparently his breathing had. Gray stepped forward and gently took Natsu's hands. He carefully pried the fingers apart.

"You're hurting yourself," the ice mage said quietly.

Natsu looked down at his palms uncomprehendingly for a moment, taking in the bloody crescent-shapes marring the skin. He hadn't realized that he had been digging his nails into his palms so deeply. Natsu supposed that Gray must have been able to feel it through the sensory link.

The ice mage released his hands and stepped back again. Natsu looked back up at him.

"Why?" he whispered. "Why are you giving up?"

Gray sighed. "Can't you feel it?" he asked. "Everything is already slipping away. I already don't remember as much as I remembered a few minutes ago. Things are getting hazy and I'm losing the memories. The curse is trying to take it all away again, and it's going to win."

"But that's not a reason to give up!" Natsu insisted, his grief flaring into a desperate anger. "Maybe it didn't work this time, but we can try again. We'll keep trying until we get you back."

"I think that you've done all you can to help," Gray answered, eyeing Natsu sadly. "At this point, I think that this is a war I have to fight on my own. You can't fight the curse for me—that's something I have to do for myself."

"Okay, but that's not giving up then," Natsu pointed out, relaxing a little. "If you're still fighting—"

"Natsu."

The dragon slayer broke off and stared at his friend apprehensively.

"This right now is as close to a second chance as we're going to get, I think," Gray said. "I can feel everything, but if there's anything you need to say to me or anything you need to hear, now is the time. It might be your last shot."

"It's not—" Natsu started, his eyes filling with tears.

"It could be," Gray interrupted. "I know you're still upset over everything that's happened. You need closure and this is your chance. Don't throw it away."

Natsu stared at him wordlessly for a moment. "I'm sorry," he whispered finally, tears running down his face. "I'm so sorry."

Gray's eyes clouded over and he wrapped his arms around Natsu, holding him tightly. "It's okay," he said softly. "It's not your fault, Natsu. It was never your fault. You need to stop blaming yourself."

Natsu started crying in earnest, his body shaking in silent sobs. "I'm sorry that you had to take the curse for me," he wailed. "I'm sorry that I left. I'm sorry that I did this to you. I'm so, so sorry."

He had thought that he'd started coming to terms with this, started letting go of the guilt a little bit, but suddenly his world was crashing down on him again and it was all coming back. Logically he knew that Gray was right and this hadn't really been his fault, but he'd played too big a part in it and he'd made mistakes, and he didn't want to think that he was going to lose the only chance to set things right again. If he had just done things differently, then maybe Gray would have been okay. He couldn't look past that.

Gray's grip on him tightened. "I'm not," the ice mage said, his voice steely and determined despite its quietness. "I'm not sorry. If Memento Mori hit you, you would have died. I don't regret that I took the curse. No matter what happened afterward, I wouldn't change that. I'm not sorry that I told you to go either. You needed to be able to say goodbye to Igneel, and I'm so sorry you lost him again like that, I really am. I'm not upset that you left—I understand why you needed to do that. And I'm not sorry about what's happened to me either. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, it's been hard on all of us. But God, Natsu, I'd rather take that curse a thousand times than watch you die.

"But I  _am_ sorry that this has hurt everyone so much and that you've been blaming yourself this whole time for something that isn't your fault. There's nothing for you to be sorry for, Natsu, but if there was, you have to know that I'd forgive you."

Natsu cried harder, hiding his face in Gray's shoulder to soak the fabric of his shirt with his tears. He needed to say something, but he didn't know what it was and he was crying too hard to choke anything out past the tears anyway.

"Maybe it would have been easier if you had just accepted that I was dead," Gray murmured softly. Natsu made a grief-stricken moaning sound in the back of his throat, not wanting to hear his friend talk like that, and Gray hugged him closer. "But at the same time, this is like a second chance, yeah? I mean, it's not the same, but it's something. And look, things aren't working out this time, but it's not a total loss. I'll lose most of the actual memories again, but I bet I'll be able to keep some of the bare bones, whatever little pieces I can hang on to. I might not be able to connect to them properly, but I should at least remember a few things, even if they only half feel like they belong to me.

"But that's about as good as it's going to get. You remember all the things Lyon was saying a few days ago when those markings showed up? I'm kind of a different person without my memories and, as such, I need to figure out my own place in the world. If I can't know who I was or who I am now, then I'll have to decide for myself who I'm going to become. So in that way it's a second chance, but it's a second chance at life, not a second chance at  _my_ life. You've been trying so hard to figure out how to get me back to normal, but that needs to stop. I can't just be 'normal' anymore. Whatever the curse has done, it's made that impossible. This has gone on long enough. Natsu, you need to let me go."

"I can't!" Natsu cried. "I can't."

He felt Gray run a hand through his hair in a comforting gesture, but Natsu didn't want to be comforted right now.

"You said that you'd stand by me no matter what happened, remember?" Gray murmured. "I'm sorry that I'm never really going to be enough without my memories, but this is the best I can give you right now. You've been figuring out how to cope with the changes in me over the past few months. All you have to do now is stop trying to fix things and settle for what you have left. Maybe over time some things will start coming back to me, but I'm just too broken to be put back together again the right way."

"You're not broken," Natsu protested. He pulled away from Gray a little to look at his friend with desperate eyes. Gray stared back sadly. "And things have been getting better. We're so close right now. It can't all be for nothing."

Gray sighed. "I  _am_ broken. My soul's a mess, my memory's shattered, the curse is eating holes in my brain, and all that's left is a hollow shell. It's too much damage. I might be able to piece together small things from time to time, but I'm never going to be able to work everything into a cohesive whole. Even now, when I'm the closest to who I was, I'm still a mess. Things still don't feel right. They're faded and distant and damaged, and they're slipping away."

"You said that you wanted to remember," Natsu whispered brokenly.

"Of course I do," Gray replied. "But me without memories is naïve because he doesn't know any better. It'll be easier if you figure out how to accept the fact that I can't just wave a magic wand and go back to normal."

"Gray—"

"I know that I've been different. I know that's not who you want me to be and I'm sorry."

Natsu's eyes filled with tears again. "I told you—"

"You've been my best friend for a long time," Gray interrupted quietly. "We've been through a lot together and we've had a lot of good times. But you don't need me anymore, Natsu. You have the rest of the guild to look out for you and you have a lot of other friends who can fill in for me. It's time to let me go and move on."

"I do need you," Natsu sobbed, leaning into Gray again to cry into his friend's shirt once more. "It's not the same without you. I want you back."

"I know, but this isn't working," Gray said. "You've been trying for months. You need to accept that maybe it's time to give up."

"You told me once that if something was important to me, I shouldn't lose it," Natsu whispered. "I don't want to lose you again, Gray."

Gray sighed quietly. "That's true," he replied. "But there comes a time when no matter how important something is, you might not be able to hold on to it any longer. You have to know when to keep fighting and when to accept the loss. You've always been good at fighting, but letting go has never been your strength. I'm sorry, Natsu, but you need to learn how to accept this or you're just going to hurt yourself even more."

Natsu shoved against Gray violently, and the ice mage stumbled back a step with a surprised grunt. Natsu glared at him through his tears.

"No," he spat. "I'm not going to give up on you."

Regret and pain and grief shone in Gray's dark eyes, but he didn't back down.

"Can't you see what's happening here?" the ice mage demanded, throwing his arms out wide and motioning to all the people surrounding them. "Can't you see what you all are doing to yourselves? It's been months— _months_ —and the guild is  _still_  broken! You try to pretend like things are going back to normal, but they're  _not_. Maybe they're getting better and it's not as bad as it used to be, but it's not anywhere near normal. So much of your time and energy has been going toward taking care of me and trying to make me remember that you don't have anything left over to take care of yourselves.

"Lyon should be at Lamia Scale with his guild and his friends, not stuck here for months worrying about me. Meredy and Jellal shouldn't have to keep coming back to check in on my progress and see if they can help more. Natsu shouldn't be devoting his whole damn life to caring for me. You all should be searching for Jii-chan and going on jobs and having a good time instead of sitting around here looking after me.

"It's been months, and I can still see all the pain and grief when I look at you. Hell, even when I barely understood what emotions were, I could still tell how upset everyone was. You all are killing yourselves! This has broken the guild, and I can't watch that anymore. I can't sit here and watch you all let life pass you by because you're waiting with bated breath in the hopes that maybe I'll remember something. I can't watch you grieve every time you realize that your hopes were unfounded. I can't take it anymore. If the guild is going to kill itself, then you had sure as hell better not do it on my account.

"Don't you understand?" he asked, the fight draining out of him as he stared at them tiredly. "You all have been obsessed with me these past months. I know you've all realized how dependent on you I've become, but the truth is that you're just as dependent on me now. Your lives revolve around trying to fix my memory and help me settle into a life I don't really understand. That needs to stop. You've done what you can. It's time to let go and move on and stop hurting yourselves. You don't need me anymore, not when you have each other. Let me go."

By this point everyone was crying, and Natsu felt like his heart had shattered into a million jagged pieces that were stabbing painfully at his insides.

"It's because we love you," Lyon whispered finally, when Natsu couldn't make himself speak and no one else seemed any better off. "We don't want to give up on you because we love you and we want you back. You wouldn't give up on us if this had happened to someone else, so why do you think that we'd give up on you?"

Gray looked away. "I understand that," he said. "But this has gone on too long. You have to face the facts. I might not be coming back for good regardless of whether or not you figure out how to move on. It's not about giving up on me. It's about learning how to live for yourselves again."

"We'll fight for you until the end," Natsu insisted tearfully, scrubbing at his face with his hands.

"I know you will," Gray answered with another sigh. "That's why I'm so worried. Look, you know Wendy's Milky Way spell she used to talk to a long-dead dragon? Think of this like that. This is just an opportunity to talk to someone who's already gone, and when it's over, you move on with your lives. You all need to start living in the present and looking to the future instead of focusing all your energy on trying to resurrect a ghost from the past."

"You're not dead," Erza interrupted, her voice trembling.

Gray stared at her for a moment and then looked away. "My body isn't. The new life I've created for myself with your help isn't. But the person you're talking to right now is basically a ghost. I don't exist the way I should anymore. Even now I'm not the same. I'm trying to hold together all the pieces of myself, and they're slowly sliding out of alignment. Once they move too far, I'm gone again. You're just going to be left with what I've become since the void."

"But you're not  _dead_ ," Natsu insisted, his hands curling into helpless fists. "Which means that it's not over yet. We can still keep trying."

Gray frowned at the ground. "Have you ever died, Natsu?" he asked softly. "Because I have. If there's one thing I've learned about death, it's that it changes you. There's  _always_ a price. You'll change. You'll lose part of yourself, and it'll leave a hollow you can't fill. And death will always hold part of you back as collateral. There are pieces of me missing, Natsu, and pieces that are broken. That missing connection I keep talking about that's preventing me from figuring things out…I don't think I'll ever be able to find it, because the things I need are gone.

"And screwing around with resurrection hurts the rest of you too. If you'd accepted I was dead and left me in the void, you would have mourned, it would have hurt, but you'd eventually move on with your lives instead of being stuck here in limbo waiting to see if someday I'll get better. Bringing me back and dragging out this foolhardy attempt to fix my memory is only serving to open yourselves up to more heartache. I'm begging you to accept your loss and find a way to move on."

Natsu buried his face in his hands. "I can't," he choked out past his tears. "I can't."

He heard Gray sigh again. Through the link he could feel his friend's hands close around something small and cold and metallic. Natsu looked up in curiosity, to see that Gray had unhooked his necklace. Reaching out, Gray took one of Natsu's hands and pressed the pendant and chain into his palm, curling the dragon slayer's fingers around it.

"When I don't have my memories, this doesn't mean anything to me," Gray said in a low voice, his dark eyes fixed on Natsu's closed hand and the length of silver chain hanging between his fingers. The ice mage dropped his hand away from Natsu's. "But it still means something to you, doesn't it? Hang on to it for me, will you?"

Natsu uncurled his fingers and stared at the little metal sword and chain for a second, before making an undignified moaning sound in the back of his throat and shoving the necklace back at Gray. He didn't want it. It felt too much like a goodbye.

"Keep it," he babbled anxiously, blinking back tears as he held it back out to Gray. "You should—you should—"

Gray reached out, but only to force Natsu's fingers to close around the parting gift once more. He smiled at the dragon slayer sadly.

"The necklace is important," he said quietly. "But there are more important things. Hold on to this for me."

The dragon slayer recognized that Gray was echoing back the same words Natsu himself had said back on the mountain, when he'd given the ice mage his scarf after he fell through the ice. It made Natsu sway unsteadily and start sobbing full force again.

Gray wrapped him in another hug and ran a hand through his hair as he cried. "Thank you for coming back for me, Natsu. It really does mean a lot. But I've been hanging over your head for too long now. I'm sorry, I really am, but you need to let me go."

Natsu just cried harder, fisting his free hand in Gray's shirt as he soaked his friend's chest with his tears. "I—I don't—"

"Can't you feel it, Natsu?" Gray asked quietly. "I can't hang on much longer. It has to be now."

Natsu could, in fact, feel it. It was an odd sensation, somehow being able to feel Gray's sense of himself slowly slipping away. He could feel Gray fighting it, struggling desperately to hang on to his memories, but it was obviously a losing battle. He could feel Gray's confusion and frustration growing as the connections he had made broke one by one and the new knowledge he had gained slowly faded and fragmented.

He supposed that he could see it too. He hadn't really noticed before since he'd been too upset and distracted, but Gray's face had been becoming steadily more strained and pale, and his body was tensed up. And despite his insistence that he was okay with this and that this was the way things had to be, Gray was terrified. Terrified and terribly, terribly sad.

Natsu released his death grip on his friend's shirt and threw his arms around Gray, hugging him tightly enough to snap the bones of a lesser man. It felt a little strange because he could feel himself hugging Gray the same way he could feel Gray hugging him. If the situation had been different, they might have laughed about it, but right now all Natsu cared about was trying to give Gray some little comfort.

Because Gray had been too damn busy trying to comfort everyone else when he himself was frightened of what he knew was going to happen, and if nothing else, he deserved to have someone comfort him too. Natsu know that everyone being upset was only making things harder for his friend. Gray would certainly understand it, but they should really try to find a way to make all of this easier for him too. The sad thing was, Natsu thought that the only way to give Gray closure and a sense of peace was for them to let the ice mage go like he had asked. Natsu didn't know how to do that. He didn't know if he could. But if what Gray needed was some kind of reassurance that they'd be able to move on with their lives…

Natsu didn't think that he could let Gray go entirely, but maybe just for a moment, he could do it for his friend. He knew that after he got over the initial shock and grief of this whole experience he would get right back up and start fighting to get Gray back again, because he didn't know how to give up and he couldn't make himself give up on his best friend. Gray probably expected that too, to be honest. But maybe Natsu could let go, just for a few seconds.

Gray must have sensed the sudden resignation through the link, because he gently detached Natsu and held him at arm's length. "Feels weird, doesn't it?" he asked with a half-smile and a hint of sad laughter.

Natsu stared back at him numbly. He knew that Gray meant that double-sensation of the hug through the link—because of course that idiot would bring up something so trivial at a time like this to try to lighten the mood—but to Natsu, it meant something else.

"Yes," Natsu said dully.

Letting go  _was_ a weird feeling. It was a sad feeling, a terrifying feeling, an alien feeling, but yeah, 'weird' just about summed it up. Natsu didn't like it.

Gray's eyes softened. "I'm sorry, Natsu."

"I am too," the dragon slayer replied quietly.

Gray took a half-step back and let his gaze sweep over the assembled mages one last time, taking in their heartbroken expressions and tearstained cheeks. Natsu could feel his grief and guilt deepen.

"God, I love you guys," Gray breathed. His voice wavered slightly.

Several people hid their faces in their hands.

"We love you too," Erza whispered.

"No matter what happens," Lyon added, his voice cracking.

There was a muted chorus of agreement, but Gray moved to cut off everyone's final words. Natsu knew why. He could feel the way that Gray was wavering on the brink, the way that things seemed to be fading away and sliding out of place.

"I know," the ice mage said. He let out a shuddering breath. "But hey, I guess it's not a fluke and you guys really are just lovable, because you managed to win me over again. I know things were really rough in the beginning, but over these past few months, even without my memories, I've grown to love you all again. I really have. You won't lose that."

He paused to stare at the ground with narrowed eyes. Natsu could feel the lump in his throat. Happy crept over to Gray's side, and the ice mage looked down at him. Smiling faintly, Gray picked the Exceed up and began stroking him as he tried to find his voice again. Natsu's hands curled into reflexive fists, the phantom sensation of soft fur brushing against his fingertips.

"I want you to be happy," Gray said finally. "I love you and I want you to be happy. I don't like seeing you all so upset because of me. Please…" He let out a breath and hugged Happy closer. "Please try. I've fought, I really have. I've been fighting for months now, and if I thought there was any chance left, I'd keep fighting for it, if only because I'd rather see you smile again. But I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry that I couldn't do more, but please…Please find a way to move on. If nothing else, I want you to be happy."

"We want you to be happy too," Natsu choked out. "You've been so frustrated and upset that you couldn't remember. If you give up now, you won't be happy, and we need you to be happy too."

Gray smiled sadly. "Probably it will always feel like something's missing. I'm sure it will bother me sometimes that I'm still such a mess. But really, it's not like I've been completely unhappy recently. Things have been getting better over the past weeks. I can work with that. And I—I can live without my memories." He closed his eyes for a second. "It will be enough just to have you guys. I don't need my memories, but I do need you. I always have. You've always made me happy, and even over these past weeks without my memories, you've still managed to make me happy sometimes despite everything."

He looked up and stared directly at Natsu. "And whatever you might have read in that notebook, I  _was_ happy. It wasn't perfect, I still had bad spells and there were things that still bothered me, but for the most part, I was happy with you. I was happy because I had all of you, and whatever else I've lost, I haven't lost that. You don't have to worry so much. Memories or not, the important thing is that you're still here, and that will be enough to make up for the rest."

Natsu hadn't realized exactly how much he'd needed that confirmation that Gray had been happy with them, before the void. Ever since his friend's post-void self had commented that Gray didn't seem like a very happy person, it had bothered Natsu. He wanted to know that Gray had been doing alright and hadn't been miserable. Some of the memories Natsu had read in the notebook were positive enough and seemed happy, but there had been a lot of really depressing things in there too. Natsu hadn't even been able to bring himself to show the others some of them, even when he and Gray had sat down with them to explain the notebook. He'd skipped over some of the worst ones.

So hearing Gray now almost eased Natsu's heartache just a little, but it didn't make things okay. And Natsu couldn't accept that Gray would be satisfied without his memories, if only because he had felt his friend's frustration and seen how much Gray's memoryless self was bothered by his inability to piece things together. Saying that having his friends around was enough was a pretty statement, but it felt hollow to Natsu. Maybe Gray really believed it, but Natsu doubted that his friend would really be as content as he wanted them to think.

"But—"

Gray shook his head. Stepping over to Natsu, he carefully placed Happy in the dragon slayer's arms. Natsu stared down at the feline blankly.

"Here," Gray said quietly, a faint smile flickering over his face again. He gently grasped Natsu's hand that wasn't holding the necklace, and guided the dragon slayer's fingers to scratch a spot just behind Happy's ear. The Exceed automatically let out a loud purr but quickly cut himself off, looking horrified that he could actually take pleasure in something at a time like this. "That's his favorite spot," Gray murmured. "He did want me to give you tips."

Releasing Natsu, he stroked Happy's head softly for a moment before stepping back, smiling sadly at the distraught feline. Natsu hugged the Exceed to his chest, absently wondering if Gray was trying to make Happy comfort Natsu or Natsu comfort Happy. Probably both.

"Take care of him for me, will you?" Gray asked Happy quietly. The Exceed nodded and buried his face in Natsu's chest to hide his tears. Gray looked around at everyone again and sighed. "I'm sorry. Take care of yourselves."

Natsu opened his mouth, but Gray shook his head sharply. The ice mage glanced over at Meredy, and Natsu knew what he wanted him to do.

"Go on, flame brain."

Natsu hesitated a moment, still reluctant to go through with this. He suddenly felt the urge to tell Gray everything, about how Natsu had never found a better friend, about how much he really did care about Gray despite all their fighting, about how much he needed Gray back again because the ice mage was that damn important to him. Natsu wanted Gray to know all of that before he…before he…Well, Natsu didn't want to think that this was a last chance, a last goodbye, but if it was, he wanted Gray to understand.

He opened his mouth, but he couldn't make the words come out. Gray smiled at him sadly.

"I know, Natsu," the ice mage murmured softly. "I've always known. And by now you should know that you mean the same thing to me."

Natsu's eyes filled with tears again. Gray reached out and brushed away the tears that broke loose and dripped down the dragon slayer's face.

"I'm sorry," Gray said again. "But it's time."

Natsu stared at him for a moment longer, trying to imprint his friend's face in his memory while Gray was still Gray and his eyes still had life in them, just in case things never went back to this again. Then he turned slowly and looked at Meredy. Steeling himself, he nodded to her, the tilt of his head so slight as to be almost imperceptible.

"Break it," he told her, the words tasting like ashes in his mouth.

She looked as if she might protest for a second, but then, although her silent tears redoubled, she broke the link.

"Goodbye," Gray whispered.

And then the link was gone and all Natsu could feel was a gaping emptiness where his friend should have been. He looked over at Gray and watched in sickened horror as the light and life seemed to drain out of the ice mage's eyes, leaving him numb and hollow again. It was terrible to watch. It was almost like watching Gray wither and die before his eyes.

Natsu was suddenly, selfishly, glad that the link had been broken so that he didn't have to  _feel_ Gray slip away. Watching it was bad enough. Then it occurred to him that Gray must have felt exactly the same way. The ice mage had initially implied that he would lose his memories again once the sensory link was broken, but Natsu knew better because he had been able to feel that his friend was fighting against the curse the whole time. Gray could have stopped fighting at any moment and slipped away, link or not. But he had held on because he wanted them to have the closure of being able to let go, and because he wanted the link to be broken first so that Natsu didn't have to feel him fading away again.

Natsu blinked back some fresh tears at that realization. Gray had always been looking after them.

Although at this moment, he didn't look like he was in a state to look after anybody. Gray was standing motionlessly in the middle of the floor, staring blankly at the far wall with dead eyes. He looked as hollow and empty as Natsu felt. Lyon, his eyes brimming with tears, reached out to see if Gray was okay. The younger mage just stared at him for a moment, and Natsu thought that he looked rather sad.

Then that horrible emptiness was temporarily eclipsed by that old feverish intensity again, and Gray suddenly lunged for the notebook lying on a nearby table. Ignoring everyone's startled exclamations, he hurriedly threw it open and began scribbling in it frantically.

"What are you doing?" Erza asked, rubbing at her eyes in a vain attempt to make the tears stop.

"Trying to write down what it felt like to be Gray, before it all fades away again," Gray said distractedly, his attention focused entirely on what he was writing.

That made Erza start sobbing again, as well as Lucy. The two girls flung themselves into each other's arms for comfort and cried.

Natsu took a few steps back and sank down onto the nearest bench, feeling too numb and cold to cry anymore. He settled Happy in his lap and absently petted the weeping Exceed with one hand, as he slowly uncurled the fingers of the hand holding Gray's last gift. He stared down at the necklace blankly for what seemed like ages before someone sat down next to him.

Lyon didn't say anything, but he wrapped one arm around Natsu's shoulders, and the three of them sat there in silence. Natsu knew that he should probably try to comfort Lyon since the older mage was crying silently and was obviously heartbroken at losing his brother again, but the dragon slayer was too numb for that and he couldn't seem to tear his eyes away from the necklace. Besides, what could he really say to Lyon to bring him comfort anyway? He couldn't even comfort himself. So although he leaned against Lyon's side, he didn't do anything else.

He didn't know how long they sat there before Gray finally finished writing and stood up, but he thought it was a long time. He supposed that he ought to be curious about what Gray had written, about which things Gray had felt were important enough to keep and what he was still able to hold on to, but he couldn't manage to summon up that curiosity right now. But he did finally look up when Gray moved silently across the room and stopped in front of the two other mages and the Exceed.

Gray stared at them wordlessly for a few moments, and Natsu tried to make out what he was feeling. The ice mage seemed melancholy and regretful, but it was hard to make anything else out from his eyes. Natsu thought that there was some new spark in his eyes that had at least some of the old Gray's feelings and personality, but he was probably deluding himself because he was so upset over losing Gray again after being so close to finally getting him back.

"It's not all gone," Gray said finally. He tightened his grip on the notebook and sheaf of drawings. "I've still got some of it, but it's all mixed up. I'm going to go back to the apartment now. I have a lot of things to sort out. I might come in kind of late tomorrow. I just…I need to work through some things."

"Do you want one of us to come with you?" Erza asked quietly.

He glanced over at her and shook his head. "No. This is something I have to do on my own."

Erza and a few others looked like they might protest, and Natsu could understand why. At the same time, he figured that Gray was right, so he met Erza's gaze and shook his head almost imperceptibly. She subsided reluctantly.

Gray looked around at all the bereft mages, taking in all the tears and pain. "I'm sorry," he said finally, his voice low. He bowed his head slightly so that they couldn't see his eyes. "I'm really sorry."

Then he turned and headed out of the guild, his strides clipped and quick as if he was in a hurry. Natsu watched numbly as he disappeared.

"Are you sure that it's really a good idea to leave him alone right now?" Lucy asked, rubbing at her eyes.

Natsu shrugged halfheartedly. "What else can we do? He's right—he needs to do this on his own. Let's just give him the rest of the day to adjust and sort through whatever leftover emotions and memories he might have. He's probably confused and overwhelmed right now. He just needs a little time to try working through whatever he can. He'll be okay."

As it turned out, Natsu might have made a mistake, because it was the next day that they realized Gray was missing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, that just happened. Sorry x.x I have a confession to make: for about thirty seconds after writing this, I seriously considered ending the story on a modified version of this chapter. But I don't want to be lynched and I figured I might as well finish things up. You're welcome. Also, if it kind of seems like Gray here and Gray's amnesic self are almost completely different people, there actually is a reason for that, plot-wise, that extends beyond my laziness.
> 
> Well, y'all can go ahead and break out the pitchforks and rotten tomatoes now XD


	24. Ch 23-Gray is missing & FT starts a hunt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, sorry for making half of you cry last chapter, ha ha. On the bright side, that was definitely the worst chapter and the other ones aren't nearly as bad. I feel like the only way I could really make things worse is if I did something like kill Gray in a horribly painful way, with like seizures and coughing up blood, and maybe even have him lose his memories for good measure and - oh wait, I already did that, didn't I? XD So I guess the only way I could make thing worse is if I make this all permanent, but I already told you I wouldn't, so you're off the hook. (This is a lie - I bet I could totally find a way to make things worse, but lucky for you, I didn't go as tragic as I could have.) So, as an apology for last chapter, because I am not completely heartless, I present you with: An Interesting Change of Perspective that No One Asked For. (This is also a lie - I'm totally heartless and I really just needed this to make the plot work, but you're more than welcome to attribute my nefarious motives to something more benign.) Enjoy this newest dose of strangeness.

* * *

**Chapter 23**

_(In which Gray is missing and Fairy Tail puts together a manhunt.)_

* * *

There were a lot of things he didn't know. They seemed to taunt him, dangling in front of his eyes for the barest fraction of a second before spinning off into the void again, leaving him empty and cold once more. If you could call it empty when there were a million shards of almost-memory and emotion swirling around violently in his head like an incomprehensible blizzard of all the broken pieces of Gray. But something  _had_ changed. For just a few minutes, he had been able to hold the pieces together. For just a few minutes, he had been Gray.

He wasn't Gray anymore, obviously, but something was different now. Most of the memories had gone as quickly as they had come, but a lot of the emotions had remained. He kind of felt a little like Gray now, but maybe a washed out version since he didn't have any of the memories to go along with it.

But there were still differences between him and Gray, and the two of them wanted different things. Gray had wanted Fairy Tail to give up and let go and move on. But he wasn't Gray anymore, and he didn't have the memories that might have prompted such a heartbreaking decision. No, he wasn't Gray, but he wanted to be. If nothing else, he wanted to know who he was, he wanted to fill in the gaps in his head, and even more than that, he wanted to see Gray's friends— _his_  friends?—smile again. Gray had made them happy. But he wasn't Gray, and no matter what Natsu or the others had said, he knew that he would never be enough for them. They needed Gray, he needed Gray, and he couldn't understand why Gray had wanted to throw that away.

He was going to fight.

So he wrote down everything that he could remember from his time as Gray. He wrote down the feelings and the memories that lingered for a moment in that twilight space between remembrance and oblivion, before they crossed that blurred line into the darkness and were gone again. The words he had written and the quick pictures he had sketched were only pale reflections of the things they were supposed to represent. They held little of the emotion and knowledge that the memories should have, but they were all that he had to work with now. They would have to be enough.

He wanted to believe that he hadn't exactly  _lied_ to Fairy Tail before he had walked out of the guild, but he couldn't say that he had been completely truthful either. He didn't know exactly what he had been planning to do with his handful of broken memories when he left, but he was already aware that he would be going on a journey. He was going to try to get lost in the hopes of being found again.

Gray had thought that the other Fairy Tail mages couldn't do any more about this problem, and he agreed. They had done a lot to try to make him remember, but this was a dead end that only he could break out of. He wasn't quite sure if he could actually do it yet, but he was going to try. This was the best chance he had right now and it might be the best one he ever got, because the curse had finally calmed down and was removing the leftover fragments at a more leisurely pace now. He needed to make his stand before it finally took everything. He still didn't really feel like Gray, but he felt more like Gray than he ever had before, and he needed to take advantage of that before that feeling faded and blurred and was lost again.

So when he had said that he might be coming in late the next day, he had already known that he would probably be gone by then. But because this wasn't something they could help with, he needed to buy himself some time to work this out on his own, because they wouldn't want to let him go by himself. It was still early afternoon and he figured that he had the rest of the day and perhaps until tomorrow afternoon before anyone realized that he was gone. He would make the best of that borrowed time.

He made sure to make enough noise going into the apartment that the landlady was sure to hear him. She left her apartment to check on him and see why he was back so early. Her face triggered a brief avalanche of tangled snippets of memory and he itched to write them down in his notebook before they were gone again, but instead he smiled and told her that he was doing just fine, thank you, but he hadn't slept well so he had fallen asleep in the guild and the others had advised him to go home and rest. The word 'home' tasted funny in his mouth because he didn't really understand what it meant, but he would say what he had to say in order to allay suspicions. And even though he felt bad about lying, he managed to do it pretty easily. Something in his head whispered that Gray had never been a good liar despite an impressive ability at hiding things with half-truths and fake smiles. Well, just one more way that he wasn't really Gray.

The landlady ate up his lies and smiled and told him to get some rest. With another insincere smile and a few last reassurances, he made his escape. Shutting the door behind him, he opened up the notebook and pulled a pen out of his pocket. The pen hovered in the air above the page for a moment, poised to write, but it was no good. The memories the landlady had stirred up had already faded away. Although he didn't really think of it as fading anymore, if he was being honest with himself. He had come to realize that there was something in the back of his mind that  _should not be there_. It was something alien that had not been a part of Gray. In this way, he was both more than and less than Gray.

But the more-than and less-than were connected, because he now knew that the extra piece—the thing that the others referred to as the curse—was what was preventing him from regaining Gray's memories— _his_ memories? Sometimes it was strong and pushed at him and bullied him with ugly words and feelings, but for the most part it was a subtle thing, all whispered threats and empty promises and tiny needle teeth. He hadn't even been fully aware of its presence at first, but he could feel it now, curling in the back of his head and wrapping its thorny tendrils around his mutilated mind. It snared the memories as they came and pulled them away again so quickly that he didn't have time to figure out the connections.

But more than that, it was temptation. It was the siren song of oblivion trying to coax him into letting go so that he could slip back into the void once more. He wasn't sure if it actually had the power to drag him back into the void in its weakened state, but he knew that he couldn't afford to give in to it. Even if he wanted to. And he did want to, sometimes. Although it sometimes terrified him, the call to nothingness was also much more seductive and enthralling than the others would ever be able to understand, and there were times that he wanted to relax into its embrace. But he had promised not to drift anymore, and looking back, he could see that giving in to the curse was exactly what the drifting had been.

So if he couldn't drift, couldn't give in, he saw two choices he could make. He could either choose to live in this fragmented half-life forever, where he was never the person he needed to be and the almost-memories stabbed at him like jagged pieces of glass in a never-ending puzzle where none of the pieces fit. That was what Gray had wanted, or rather what Gray had thought that the others needed to accept. Or he could fight this and try to regain what he had lost. This was the current plan.

He felt the curse wrap around some little piece of his mind and drag it away, and he grimaced. He was certainly glad that it had calmed down now because it had immediately flared up in a hissing fury when he'd been Gray and touched all of those memories for a moment. And it had  _hurt_. Having a lifetime of memories crowded into his head all at once and then torn away again in chunks had been disorienting and painful and he was still recovering from it. But he also worried that the curse had been a little overzealous in its assault on him. He got the feeling that it might have taken away some of the things he had managed to hang on to before, but so far it had also left some things he hadn't known, although it would surely sink its teeth into those soon enough. It was hard to tell though, because his head was a mess and he still couldn't make sense of it.

One thing he did still sort of have were some of his memories from his time as Gray. He could remember the hugging and the words that were said and some of the emotions, but those few minutes also felt somewhat alien. It was a weird feeling, being able to remember doing things but still somehow feeling like it had been someone else doing them. He did know that Gray had felt much the same way though. Gray had been able to talk like they'd been a unified person so that he didn't worry the others, but the truth was that even though Gray could remember everything he'd said and done over the past months, the memories had felt strange and almost alien as well, as if they'd only half-belonged to Gray and half-belonged to him.

That really only made him feel like more of a fraud. He wondered absently how likely it was that maybe he had never been Gray at all, and was just some kind of impostor ripped from the void and shoved into someone else's head. Probably not very likely. He suspected that expressing a thought like that would just earn him another whack on the head and an incredulous query about how he came up with this nonsense. He almost wanted to go back to the guild just so that they could knock some sense into him, but he couldn't do that.

The others were all still upset, and it was kind of his fault because he wasn't Gray like they wanted him to be. He wouldn't be selfish enough to seek comfort from them right now, not while they were still reeling from their loss. Besides…He didn't really want to see the way they looked at him right now. They might say that he had looked at them differently since the void, but the truth was that they looked at him differently too. He hadn't realized exactly how different that was until he had been Gray and had seen how they looked at Gray and then compared it to how they looked at him. They didn't mean to do it and they tried to hide in when they did realize that they were doing it, but he could see it anyway. There would be the disappointment that he wasn't Gray, the knowledge that there was something wrong with him and he wasn't quite right, the sadness that he knew was his fault. He couldn't bear to see that right now, not when he was still such a tangled up mess.

And that was, he knew, one of the reasons why he was going to make one last-ditch effort to find Gray. Gray had thought that the continued struggle to get him to remember was hurting the others, and that was true. He knew that. But it was also true that the others were hurting simply because he wasn't Gray, and that hurt wasn't so easy to let go of, even if they tried to give up on Gray. And Gray had also been right in saying that he'd learned how to care about these people since the void, and because he cared, he wanted them to be happy as much as Gray did. If they needed Gray to be happy, then he would go find Gray.

He was also doing this for Gray, because it was hard to tell where he ended and Gray began, but from what he remembered from those few minutes, he found himself intrigued by the man he was supposed to be. Mostly it was because he remembered how scared and unhappy Gray had been, how much Gray hadn't wanted to give up but hadn't wanted to keep up a wild goose chase that would hurt the others. Gray had most certainly wanted to remember. And because he still felt like something of an impostor that had taken over Gray's body and life, he felt like he owed something to Gray.

He wanted to say that he was doing it for himself too, because he was tired of his fragmented existence, but that part was a little more complicated. The others were convinced that he was Gray and just needed to remember some things, but neither he nor Gray had been one hundred percent sure of that. He felt more like they were both incomplete ghosts, each missing too many pieces to be whole, trying to make something out of what little they had left. Gray might be dead-er, but also belonged in this world. He, on the other hand, was here, but living only a partial life in a world that wasn't fully his own. Maybe they could only be whole if they smashed themselves together somehow, but judging from how odd those few minutes had felt…It almost felt like they were just one more memory of Gray's that had resurfaced on its own but didn't really belong to him. And if it didn't belong to him, then maybe the truth was that he hadn't been there at all and was only remembering what Gray had done. In that case, maybe only one of them could be here at a time.

And if that was true, then he was in something of a dilemma. If he was the fraud and there could only be one, then it should be Gray here, because Gray belonged. No matter how much the others had tried to get him to feel like he belonged here, no matter how much he sometimes almost felt like he belonged with them, the truth was that he was a child of the void, and the void never let go of its own.

That line of thinking felt a little too much like dying for his taste. He wasn't sure that he really wanted to die. But maybe it would be more like disappearing. He belonged to the void after all, and it was part of him, and the void was all about nonexistence. Sure it scared him a little, but he'd also found it strangely alluring too, hadn't he? Because some part of him had always felt not quite human, like he didn't quite exist the way he should and belonged back in the void, even if he mostly wanted to stay here with the new friends he had made.

A tear dripped down his cheek and he wiped it away, frowning at the little droplet of water sliding down his finger. He wondered if it was his or Gray's. Gray had spent those minutes not allowing himself to cry because it would make it harder for his friends, and those fragmented emotions were still bouncing around in his head. Maybe it was a leftover response from that. Maybe he was just crying Gray's tears because he was the only one left here and Gray couldn't cry them himself anymore. Or maybe it was just because he was upset and his head was a mess and he felt like he had been  _so close_ but had lost it all again.

He was willing to give up all of himself to get Gray back, but he would draw the line here. He would cry his own tears or none at all. He was tired of Gray's emotions and memories hijacking his own, almost as much as he was tired of the curse screwing everything up. He would give up all the rest, but was it too much to ask for to keep this one little part of himself to himself?

He carefully dried his face and set his mouth in a grim line. He didn't have time for this. Lyon had told him that it was up to him to make his own choices and decide what to do with his life. He had chosen to find Gray, to fight for Gray, whatever that meant for himself. He wasn't sure that he was really in control here, but he was capable of making his own decisions and fighting his own fights.

But this was a fight that couldn't be fought alongside the others, and it couldn't be fought here. So he grabbed a bag and threw a few things in it. Detaching the last few remaining pages from the mangled sketchbook, he pressed the sheaf of drawings into the notebook and deposited the whole thing into the bag. Then he quickly scratched out a note to the others and slipped out of the apartment as quietly as possible, making sure that the landlady couldn't hear him this time.

He paused outside of the apartment for a moment and looked over in the direction of the guild even though he couldn't see it from here, resisting the urge to go back and seek out the people he had finally come to believe were really his friends. He shook his head slightly. No hesitation.

So, with nothing more than a handful of paper memories, a renewed sense of determination, and a deadly siren song playing in the depths of his mind, he walked away and was gone.

* * *

Natsu was a mess. Everyone was a mess, really, but Natsu was too much of a mess right now to worry too much about how everyone else was taking things. They had been  _so close_. Gray had been right there, and then he had slipped through their fingers again. It wasn't fair, and God, it hurt.

Natsu had technically told Gray that he was finally letting him go, but the dragon slayer thought that they both knew that was a lie. He wasn't in any kind of state to pick up the fight again at this very moment, but in a day or two when he had patched up his broken heart as best he could and found a renewed sense of determination to get back to work, he would be right there trying to help Gray remember again. Natsu hadn't been lying when he'd said that he couldn't let Gray go.

But all of that was for tomorrow. Today Natsu would go back home to lick his wounds and mourn. Being in the guild felt like sitting through a funeral and Natsu was too numb and hurt to want to deal with that, so he headed back to his house right after Gray left, bringing Lyon and Happy with him. None of them spoke much. Lyon disappeared into the guest room as soon as they reached the house and didn't come out for the rest of the day. Natsu curled up on his bed and hugged Happy for comfort, still clutching Gray's necklace in one hand as he stared blankly at the far wall.

To be honest, no one did much besides lie around and mope. Natsu thought that maybe he should use this time to start planning the next step in Gray's recovery, but he was too numb and sad right now, and his thoughts were too sluggish to be of much help. He figured that he could do it tomorrow.

Not that he was really feeling much better the next day. But still, when morning came he gathered up the others, finally put on Gray's necklace underneath his scarf for safekeeping, and set off for the guild. A gloomy atmosphere still hung over the guild hall, but at least some of the mages were trying to be a little more cheerful in an attempt at normalcy, although it wasn't very convincing. Despite that, everyone was tense and on edge as they waited for Gray to show up, and Natsu knew why. They were all uncertain about what would happen when Gray came back. How were they supposed to treat him now? Had anything changed? Was he any different from how he had been these past months? What were they supposed to do?

The tension continued to build as the minutes ticked by and Gray still didn't arrive.

"Maybe we should go get him," Erza said finally, her quiet voice slicing through the nervous chatter.

There were a few murmurs of agreement, but Natsu shook his head slightly. "He said that he'd come when he's ready," the dragon slayer replied dully. "I bet he's pretty confused right now and he has a lot of things to work out. Just…let him take the time he needs to pull himself back together again."

"It's already two in the afternoon," Lucy protested, although her voice was more subdued than argumentative. "What if he's not okay?"

Natsu's lips tightened. In truth, he was just as anxious as the others for Gray to walk through those doors, and he was itching to march over to his friend's apartment right now to make sure that everything was alright. But he also didn't want to push Gray, especially not when the ice mage might be in a particularly precarious state right now.

"If he doesn't show up in the next hour, I'll go get him," he told her flatly, fixing his unblinking eyes on the clock hanging on the far wall.

No one argued with that, just gave him sympathetic looks and tried to return to their conversations even if they were too distracted to really pay much attention to them. Natsu didn't bother joining in, instead contenting himself with watching the clock and absently stroking Happy as he waited.

It was almost an hour later that something finally happened. Natsu was just preparing to go fetch Gray when the landlady hobbled into the guild hall. Natsu's heart immediately jumped into his throat, because he couldn't imagine any positive reason that she had walked all the way down here, and given what had happened yesterday, it was an even more ominous sign. He stood quickly and made his way over to her, upending Happy from his lap in his haste.

"What happened?" Natsu demanded, his voice panicky. Silence fell over the hall. "Is something wrong?"

She abandoned her visual search of the hall and frowned over at him. "Gray isn't here?" she asked, looking faintly worried.

Natsu's heart stopped. Forcing himself to suck in a breath, he tried not to jump to conclusions even though he was already starting to panic.

"No. We thought he was still at the apartment. Did he go back yesterday? Did you hear him leave?"

The landlady's frown deepened. "I thought that perhaps he had left early this morning and I hadn't heard him. You know, since he came back so early to rest, I thought that maybe he would be up and about earlier than usual," she told him.

Natsu stared at her blankly. "Is that what he told you?" he asked, his voice suddenly flat although fear was clawing at his insides.

"He said that he hadn't slept well so he had fallen asleep in the guild hall and you all suggested that he go home early to rest," the landlady said slowly, blinking in faint bewilderment.

For a moment, there was dead silence in the guild.

"Fuck," Lyon said finally. "Why would he lie?"

The landlady finally seemed to realize that something big was going on here that she didn't fully understand, and she was looking more and more concerned by the second. "What happened?" she asked.

Natsu didn't have the patience to explain everything now. They could play catch-up later, when Gray was safely found. Maybe they were worried over nothing and Gray would appear in the next couple minutes and be confused about why they were all freaking out, but this newest revelation was making that possibility seem awfully unlikely.

"Tell us everything that happened since yesterday," Natsu said hurriedly. "We'll explain the rest later."

The old woman's worried frown deepened, but she obliged. "He came back early yesterday—perhaps around three or four in the afternoon?—and he made a lot of noise coming in, so I went to check up on him because I was surprised that he was back so early. That's when he gave me the excuse about coming back early to rest. He seemed to be in good spirits and I didn't see anything wrong, so I went back to my apartment. I didn't think much of it except that I didn't hear him leave this morning, and he usually drops by to say good morning before he comes here. I thought that perhaps he had left especially early since he had gotten extra rest in the afternoon, and maybe he hadn't wanted to wake me up. But…I don't know. It's not so much that I thought something was wrong, but something felt off. I knocked on his door but he didn't answer. I was going to leave it at that, but then I decided to drop by here just to make sure that he had arrived safely, but…it doesn't look like he made it here."

Natsu stared at her, a nauseous feeling curling in his stomach. Gray had most definitely not been in good spirits when he had left the guild yesterday. Even after the memories had slipped away again, he had still seemed unhappy and frustrated. It was hard to believe that everything was okay when Natsu now knew that Gray had straight up lied to his landlady and pretended to be in a good mood when he clearly had not been. It meant that Gray was hiding things.

"I'm going to go to his apartment and look for any clue as to what might have happened," the dragon slayer said finally, already turning away to head for the door. "If nothing else, I should be able to pick up his scent and follow him."

"I'll come too," Lyon added hastily, following after Natsu.

Natsu was vaguely aware that Erza, Lucy, and Happy were also following him and that the others were finally telling the poor, confused landlady about what had happened yesterday, but he was too distracted to worry about it now. He only cared about what might have happened to Gray, because something was wrong here.

He practically flew through the streets, leaving the others struggling to keep up. He was already outside Gray's door before he realized that he didn't have any way to get inside the apartment. He cursed quietly. Maybe the landlady had a master key and could get in, but she was all the way back at the guild and he was in too much of a rush to go back now. He briefly debated kicking down the door, but then remembered the spare key. Hurrying back out past the others and ignoring their puzzled questions, he paused in front of the outside wall of the building, studying the bricks in an attempt to remember which one was loose.

There, that one was slightly ajar. He yanked it out and breathed a sigh of relief when he realized that Gray had made sure to replace the key there. Jamming the brick back into place unceremoniously, he clutched the key tightly in his hand and rushed back to the door. He fumbled with the lock for a moment before finally forcing the key into place and opening the door.

Heading inside, Natsu immediately began sniffing around as he looked for any sign of what might have happened to Gray.

"He was definitely here," the dragon slayer muttered absently. Gray's scent still lingered in the room, but it was fainter than it should have been. "But he hasn't been here for hours at least. I don't think he stayed here long."

"Guys, you might want to see this," Lucy called, breaking Natsu out of his daze.

The dragon slayer hurried over to where the celestial spirit mage was standing in Gray's bedroom, beside his bed. The others all crowded into the room as well and circled around Lucy, who was holding a piece of paper in her hand. She silently held it out to them so that they could read it.

_'I'm sorry, but there's something I need to take care of. I don't know how long it will take—hopefully not too long. Don't worry, I'm fine. Stay in the guild. I'll be back soon.'_

Natsu stared at it blankly for a moment and reread it, but nothing new appeared. Those few words were it.

"At least nothing bad happened to him?" Lucy ventured uncertainly.

"We don't know that," Natsu growled. "What is he playing at? He could get himself into all kinds of trouble, running around without any memories."

He didn't know what Gray was doing, but it certainly wasn't something as trivial as running out to the store for groceries. Gray had taken pains to cover his tracks. If he had just told them where he was going and what he was doing then Natsu might not worry, but this whole thing felt too secretive to be anything good.

"Can you track him by scent?" Erza asked him.

Natsu nodded sharply and got back to work. The others followed him as he headed out of the building and began following Gray's scent through the streets. And then he ran into a problem.

"What's wrong?" Lyon demanded anxiously as Natsu came to a dead stop.

The dragon slayer grimaced and started pacing up and down the stretch of road, sniffing at the air in a desperate bid to pick up the scent again.

"Shit," he said.

Gray knew how sensitive Natsu's nose was. Even amnesic Gray had some idea, although he might not know all the best ways to get around it. But the old Gray  _had_ known all the tricks to avoid Natsu if he wanted to. If the old Gray didn't want to be found, he wouldn't be found. Apparently the ice mage retained some implicit knowledge of those tricks. And he didn't want to be found.

"I lost him," Natsu said shortly. "He took pains to make sure I couldn't follow him. We've been going in giant loops because he circled around the city and made sure that he stopped by all the busiest places where lots of people's scents would mingle with his, and also all the places he frequents most often so that it's harder to tell if he's been there recently or not. I've been having to take guesses this whole time. If I look for his scent in a specific place I might be able to tell if it's fresh or not, but it's too hard to follow his path like this."

He scowled. "Look at where we are." He gestured behind them, and they turned to see that they had come up on the guild hall again. "His scent is all over this place since he's here so often. It's going to be damn difficult to find the freshest trail here."

Lucy's face fell. "You really aren't going to be able to follow him?"

Natsu bit his tongue to stop himself from pointing out that  _yes_ , that was exactly what he just said. He knew that she was just as worried as the rest of them. So he just nodded instead.

Erza let out a harsh breath. "Well, since we're already here, we might as well go inside and tell the others what we found."

They filed into the guild hall despondently, and Natsu remained quiet and let Erza take on the role of storyteller for the others. When she had finished, a heated debate immediately sprang up.

"Well, he obviously didn't want us to follow him, and he told us to stay here so that we wouldn't," Gajeel pointed out.

"And?" Natsu snarled, his eyes flashing furiously as he turned on the other dragon slayer and bared his teeth threateningly.

Gajeel held his hands up in an attempt to ward off Natsu's hostility and calm him down. "Relax, Salamander," he grunted.

Natsu growled deep in his throat as he glowered at Gajeel. He didn't want to relax. Gray was missing, Gray could be hurt, Gray could need Natsu, and Natsu _wasn't there_. Natsu needed to be there this time. He didn't think he could handle it if something happened to Gray again. And Gajeel was suggesting that they just sit around and wait? Like hell they would.

"All I'm saying is that he obviously had some kind of plan here and he didn't want us involved," Gajeel explained, eyeing Natsu warily. "We have no idea where he might be. You couldn't track him and you have the best nose out of all of us. What are you going to do, wander aimlessly around the city looking for him? He could be anywhere. The only thing we  _do_ know is that he's planning to come back, so he should end up back here eventually whether we go chasing after him or not."

"Oh, so you just want to wait around here and hope that nothing is fucking wrong?" Natsu asked, his voice dangerously low.

A restraining hand dropped onto his shoulder and he reflexively twisted around and snapped at the air with his teeth. Lyon's eyes widened and he hurriedly removed his hand and stepped back. Natsu blinked at him for a moment and then grimaced.

"Sorry," he muttered.

Lyon eyed him cautiously but inched forward again. "It's okay," he said. "I know you're on edge. We all are. But you need to calm down and think for a minute. I don't want to just sit around and wait either, but if we want to go after him then we need to think this through and come up with a plan. We need to figure out where he might have gone."

Natsu took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It didn't help reduce his tension much, but it gave him a few moments to try getting his panicked anger under control. Lyon was right. They needed to think this through, and he wasn't going to get anywhere by panicking and snapping everyone's heads off.

He turned back to Gajeel. "Sorry," he grumbled.

The other dragon slayer just nodded and looked reluctant to speak again and risk sending Natsu over the edge.

" _Everyone_ needs to take a deep breath and calm down for a minute," Erza said firmly, fixing them all with hard stares. She gave Natsu a particularly pointed look, although she looked slightly sympathetic as well. "Alright, does anyone have any idea of what might have happened?"

One look at the circle of glum, frightened faces made it clear that no one had a clue.

"If you had no memories, where would you go?" Lucy mused, a thoughtful frown spreading across her face as she considered the question.

"The only memories he really has are the ones he's made since he came back from the void," Mira pointed out. "And those are all of us and the guild. If I didn't have any memories then I think I'd want to stay in the one place where I actually knew something. I'd think that the world would be a scary place if I didn't remember any of it."

"Yes, well he's clearly not here," Laxus said shortly.

Mira gave him a hurt look. "I was just saying," she protested defensively.

"Mira makes a good point," Erza interrupted, giving Laxus a quelling look. "I'd say that her line of reasoning is perfectly logical, but something obviously happened to change that for Gray."

"He seemed content to stay here right up until yesterday," Levy said slowly.

"And what suddenly changed yesterday?" Lyon demanded suddenly, his eyes widening slightly.

Natsu stared at him and they both looked at each other for a moment, understanding dawning in their eyes. When Natsu glanced back at the others, he saw that they were starting to pick up on Lyon's train of thought as well.

"He said that he wanted us to let him go," Lucy remarked, frowning faintly. "So why…?"

"Because that was old Gray—our Gray," Natsu replied, the pieces finally starting to fall into place. "You know that post-void Gray doesn't really feel like he's…well, like he's Gray. He would have lost all of his memories and feelings again, which are probably what prompted Gray to ask us to give up in the first place. Without those…"

"So Gray-sama might still want to remember after all?" Juvia asked hopefully.

Natsu shrugged. "He wanted to remember before we tried the sensory link," he pointed out. "If he went back to how he was before, it's quite possible that he's still willing to fight for it regardless of what he thought while he had all his memories back."

Everyone was perking up now as they considered that. Such a revelation didn't tell them where Gray was, of course, but it gave them something to work with.

"Okay, so maybe he decided to travel to some of the places he remembered when he got his memories back in the hopes that they would trigger some more permanent memories?" Erza suggested.

"But where?" Gajeel asked flatly.

"Well…places that were important to him?" the requip mage offered uncertainly.

"Not necessarily," Gajeel said grimly. "We don't know what he wrote down in that notebook of his. We don't know what pieces of memory he might still have. In all this time since he's started remembering bits and pieces, have you noticed a pattern? Because I sure haven't. He doesn't always remember the important things, and he wouldn't know any better. If he remembered a place or wrote it down then he might assume that it used to be important to him, but for all he knows, it could be some random town he only visited once in his life for a job or something. He wouldn't know any better. He could be anywhere."

Natsu's heart sank, because although he didn't want to admit it, Gajeel was right. Gray's memory flashes had never seemed to have any kind of rhyme or reason to them, aside from sometimes being related to something that he was currently experiencing. He didn't remember important things any more than he remembered random little snippets. It was possible that he had a better handle on what the important things were because he had started writing things down while he still remembered a little bit of what it felt like to be his old self, but it was equally likely that he had lost it too quickly to be of much help. Natsu mentally berated himself for not looking at what Gray had written before he had left the guild. At least if they had seen the notebook then they'd have a clue about…

He whipped around to face Lyon and the rest of the team. "When we were in his apartment, you didn't happen to see his notebook lying around anywhere, did you?" he demanded.

There was a pause as they all considered that.

"No, I didn't," Lyon said. "I mean, I might have missed it since I wasn't looking for it, but…What are the chances that he would have left it behind?"

Natsu sighed and deflated. He had known it was a long shot when he had suggested it. Ever since Gray had finally shown Natsu what was in the notebook, the ice mage had kept it on him at all times. And if he really was looking for a way to regain his memories, he would almost certainly have brought it with him.

"Almost zero," Natsu admitted in defeat.

"It seems unlikely," Erza agreed. "But we can send someone to go do a more thorough sweep of his apartment later. But first…Does anyone have any ideas on where he might have run off to?"

"Almost anywhere," Gajeel grumbled unhappily.

"Well yes," Lucy replied, "but that doesn't do us any good. We'll have to make a list of places he might have gone. It might be hard since we don't know what he remembers and what he doesn't, but couldn't we at least guess where he might have gone if he  _did_ remember which places were the most important? We could start there since it's the best lead we have."

Natsu nodded slowly. It was true that it would be impossible to come up with a lead if they just assumed that Gray could be anywhere. But if they could at least start narrowing it down then maybe they could make something work.

"His hometown," Lyon said flatly. Natsu glanced back over at the other ice mage, to see that he had folded his arms across his chest and was staring at the ground with narrowed eyes. "Isvan. Brago. Ur's home. Take your pick." He finally looked up and met Natsu's eyes. "He briefly recognized Ur even before he got all his memories back. That might prompt him to go to places associated with her."

Natsu grimaced faintly, but he had to agree. "And besides that, did you see how he was organizing all the pictures before he remembered everything?" the dragon slayer asked. "He had them in three main groups: his family, you and Ur, and Fairy Tail. That means that even before he got his memories back, he could sense something was important about those groupings. He's been with Fairy Tail for months without luck, so he might have gone to look for places associated with the other two groups, like his home city or Ur's home."

"Yes, I think you might be right," Lyon conceded thoughtfully.

Natsu smirked in triumph for a second, before his satisfaction faded away as his fear seeped back in. But he had to admit that he and Lyon made a good team, because Lyon was the one who had known Gray best as a child and Natsu was the one who knew Gray best now, both before and after the memory loss.

"That's very plausible," Erza agreed. "And it sounds like a good place to start. But we also need to take into account other possibilities as well, just in case."

A brief debate sprung up about what other possible places Gray might wind up at. It was mostly a lot of guesswork and conjecture, and so far Lyon's idea was their best shot.

"Well, we clearly need to send someone up to Isvan," Erza said with a sigh. "And we'll have someone go check out his apartment again to see if there's anything we overlooked. Then perhaps we could set up different search parties to go to different places and look for him. We should also split up the dragon slayers on the off-chance that they can pick up his scent if they run across it."

"Lyon and I will go up to Isvan," Natsu said immediately. "Happy, you can come too, to help us scout by air."

The dragon slayer glanced over at Lyon and their eyes met. The ice mage nodded slightly. Happy fluttered over to Natsu's side, his eyes shining with determination. Juvia looked like she was thinking about protesting, so Erza hurriedly stepped in again.

"I think that's a good idea," the requip mage replied firmly. "Lyon will know where all the important places in Isvan are and Natsu is the one who best understands Gray's state of mind right now, as much as that might be."

She turned back to the others. "Why don't Gajeel and Team Shadowgear go back to take a look at Gray's apartment? See if we missed anything. And Gajeel, go ahead and try following Gray's trail, if you can." She frowned a little. "That leaves us with Wendy, I suppose."

"Why don't we ask Sting and Rogue for help?" Lucy suggested hesitantly. "They're dragon slayers too."

"You'd better hurry up about it then," Gajeel grunted. "Scents don't stay fresh for long, and if what the Salamander said is right, Gray's scent is already over half a day old. It's gonna be a rush job if we actually expect to find anything."

Erza grimaced. "I suppose that's true. But if nothing else, having some dragon slayers with sharpened senses makes it less likely that we'll walk right past him without realizing it. We'll send for Sting and Rogue. In the meantime, why don't we send Wendy and a team out to scout the city? It's possible that Gray is still running around Magnolia. And then we'll set up a few more teams to check strategic sites outside the city, and leave a few people here in case he comes back."

"And you can stay home and let us know if Gray comes back to the apartment," Lyon told the landlady kindly.

She had been watching the goings-on with worried eyes, and Natsu felt a little bad that he hadn't even realized that she was still there. Ah, well. Was it really that surprising that they were so distracted?

The landlady nodded absently. "Good luck finding him," she said solemnly.

"Here, Gajeel, Levy, Jet, and Droy will walk back to the apartment with you," Erza added, motioning to the mentioned mages, who nodded in acknowledgement.

"Wait, if we're all running around different places and at least most of us aren't going to find Gray, shouldn't we designate a meeting time?" Lucy suggested. "Otherwise we could be searching forever."

Erza nodded and looked over at Lyon. "How long do you think is reasonable to take a look around Isvan?"

He frowned faintly. "Including travel and enough time to really look at each location and search for signs that Gray was there…At least five days."

He looked a little reluctant, probably because he'd rather not have a time limit to work under. Natsu knew the feeling. He would rather scour Isvan until they found Gray too, but he could grudgingly admit that this might be a wild goose chase. They didn't even know if that was where Gray had gone, and they could spend weeks searching a place that Gray had never been at all.

"Alright," Erza decided. "All teams will meet back here in the guild hall in five days to report back any findings. We'll decide where to go from there, if he isn't found by then. Hopefully we're worrying over nothing and he'll show up on his own soon."

There was a muted chorus of agreement, and then mild chaos broke out as everyone started forming into teams and getting assignments from Erza.

"Let's go," Natsu said to Lyon and Happy, not particularly interested in hearing who was teaming up with who and where everyone was deciding to search. He was impatient to get going, because he wanted to find Gray as quickly as possible. The others could worry about their own assignments. He would worry about his.

The walk to the train station was surprisingly quiet, perhaps because they were too worried and distracted to really discuss any kind of plan, even though they probably should. When they got there, Natsu sent Lyon to buy the tickets while he and Happy searched the station. It was hard to pick out any individual scents given how much traffic came through here every day, but just as Natsu was about to give up, he finally picked up a whiff of Gray's scent. He couldn't say exactly how old it was given how difficult it was to distinguish among the dozens of other scents, but Gray hadn't exactly frequented the train station since he had come back from the void. And if Natsu could pick up his scent here at all, it must be fresh. Otherwise it would have already disappeared, masked by the hundreds of others.

He immediately rushed over to where Lyon was purchasing the tickets. "He was here!" Natsu exclaimed.

Lyon looked at him in surprise. "Really?"

"Yes! We should go tell the others. He obviously got on a train, so he's not in the city anymore."

Lyon frowned a little as he passed over the jewels for their tickets. "Can you be sure that he didn't just walk through here on his way?" the ice mage asked. "You said that he was looping all around the city and going through the busiest areas to throw you off, and this is one of the busiest areas around here. I can't imagine it's easy to pick out scents with how much foot traffic goes through here. Are you sure that he got on a train?"

Natsu's face fell. He hadn't considered that. "No," he said with a sigh. "I can't be one hundred percent sure."

"Besides, even if he did leave on a train, he might come back to the city at some point," Happy pointed out reasonably. "So maybe it's not a good idea to call off the search of the city."

Natsu deflated visibly. When he had picked up Gray's scent he had been so hopeful, so excited, that he hadn't really taken the time to think of alternative explanations.

"Here's your change," the ticket seller droned, holding out a handful of jewels to Lyon, which the ice mage pocketed.

Lyon moved out of line and started walking away, but Natsu stayed still for a moment, studying the vendor with narrowed eyes. They still had a few minutes before their train came. He might as well make the most of it.

"Can I help you?" the man behind the counter asked irritably.

Lyon turned back around. "What are you doing, Natsu? Come on."

Natsu didn't look back at the other mage. Instead he leaned forward, toward the vendor.

"Have you seen a man about this tall?" he asked, estimating Gray's height with his hand. "With black hair and dark eyes? Don't know if he stripped or not, but if he was shirtless then he would have a dark blue Fairy Tail guild mark on his chest. Probably came through yesterday afternoon or evening."

Go figure. In the past, Natsu would have at least been able to count on Gray's stripping habit to attract attention, but Gray hadn't stripped as much since the void. It was possible that some of his old habits would come back more strongly now since he had temporarily been himself, but Natsu couldn't count on that.

"No," the vendor said with a scowl, irritation coloring his voice. "You think I remember every person who comes through here? You have any idea how many people buy tickets here every day?" He snorted disdainfully. "Besides, I wasn't on duty yesterday anyway."

Well, Natsu thought that the ticket seller could have just said that last part and left out the rest of his pointless rant. Jerk. He scowled at the man and then stalked away.

He asked the other ticket sellers the same question, Lyon and Happy trailing along to offer their assistance, but they had no more luck. Some of them hadn't been working the previous day and the ones who had been all said that they didn't remember seeing anyone of Gray's description, but that they might have forgotten.

"Natsu, our train is pulling into the station," Lyon said quietly after they tried talking to the fourth vendor without success.

Natsu nodded reluctantly, but it wasn't like their investigation of the station was going anywhere. So he boarded the train with Lyon and Happy, and the trio set off on their journey to find Gray and bring him back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, nothing much really happened in this chapter. That's because this was originally supposed to be the final chapter, but I ended up writing everything out in a lot more detail, so now it's three chapters instead. Next chapter is the monster chapter - the main body of what would have been the final chapter. It's long x.x
> 
> As for Gray's POV, it's kind of intentionally confusing. I feel that it lends authenticity to Gray's current state of mind, especially when it starts getting hard to tell when he's talking about his post-void self or pre-void self. Plus there are other reasons I wrote it this way, and I'm sure you'll figure out some of them.


	25. Ch 24-Both FT & Gray continue the search

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything here is derived from things in canon, although I expanded some things and didn't feel bad about taking a few liberties since we mostly just get hints about some of the things from Gray's childhood. I have reasons for writing it the way I did, even the parts in Gray's hometown. As a warning, there are a couple parts that are a little dark.

* * *

**Chapter 24**

_(In which both Fairy Tail and Gray continue the search.)_

* * *

He didn't know where he was going, exactly, so in that way he was lost. But he had a map of sorts, even if it was a torn and fragmented thing that gave as many questions as answers. He would just have to hope that it would be enough.

After taking a quick detour to ensure that Natsu wouldn't be able to follow his scent—he wasn't exactly sure how he knew the best ways to fool the dragon slayer's nose, but he supposed that Gray must have known—he had gotten on a train. The only challenge had been in deciding what ticket to buy with some of the leftover jewels from the food stash. He had some vague idea of where he was going first, but he didn't know any of the specifics. He had a general direction in mind and he had written down that the thing holding these torn pieces together was the word 'Isvan', which had confused him at first until he concluded that it was a place. A big place. Maybe he could get to this 'Isvan', but he wasn't sure if he would be able to find what he was looking for once he got there. He would cross that bridge when he came to it.

For now he was train-hopping, aimlessly drifting from train to train every time he reached the end of the line. He had managed to pick up a general map in one of the stations and he could see Isvan labeled on it. It worried him a little because it was such a big, blank space. He had tried overlaying his own map on top of it, but the memories didn't connect and he still didn't know where the places on his map fit into that yawning expanse of white. He had eventually given up on that endeavor, instead carefully marking off every station and town he passed through on his journey if he could find its name on the map. That way he could make sure that he was still going in the right direction and he had some idea of where he currently was. He'd worry about the rest when he got to Isvan.

But in all honesty, that map wasn't nearly as useful to him as the other things he had brought, so he tucked it away in his bag. He had a long train ride ahead of him, so he pulled out his own map instead, carefully spreading some of its more important pieces out on the empty seat beside him. He studied the drawn pictures and written words carefully, looking for any spark of recognition or sudden knowledge. These were the things that had originally helped him fit the pieces together for a moment so that he could be briefly be Gray, but nothing clicked into place this time. He was a little disappointed, but not surprised.

One of the pictures in particular caught his eye and he picked it up to get a closer look. It was one of the drawings he had shown Natsu back when he had first shown the dragon slayer the sketchbook, the one with the whole team together. The one where he had really been able to see Gray's love for his friends bleeding through.

He ran his fingers across the surface of the page, lingering briefly over each person's face for a moment as he studied them wistfully. They looked so happy. Natsu, Erza, Lucy, Happy. It was funny, but he didn't have such a hard time using their names anymore. He had told Natsu that part of the reason he had such difficulty with names was that he couldn't seem to connect all the memories and feelings and characteristics of each person into a cohesive whole, and that was true.

But something had changed, because while he had been Gray, he knew these people. And even though he wasn't Gray anymore, even though he had lost most of Gray's memories again, he had been able to fit the people back together again in a way that he almost, almost understood. Before, this whole puzzle of life had been broken down into its barest elements and he hadn't been able to figure out how they fit together, but now he had at least been able to jigsaw some of those elements into people. Now the basic elements he had to work with were people rather than random characteristics or memory snippets. He knew that the people all fit together too, all pieces in a bigger puzzle, but he hadn't figured out that part yet. He thought that it had something to do with the groups he had been organizing the pictures into.

Well, he hadn't managed to fit the people together yet, but that's what he was hoping to do on this journey, because…

His thoughts trailed off for a moment and he brought the paper a little closer to his face as he squinted at the drawing of Gray.

"Who are you?" he whispered, ignoring the odd looks the couple sitting a few seats away was giving him. "Where are you now?"

This man who looked like him but wasn't…Just who  _was_ Gray Fullbuster? He didn't know. He could make out some of Gray's personality from the drawings and from the memory flashes and from those few brief minutes where everything had made sense, but it wasn't enough. Natsu and the others kept telling him that he was Gray, but that wasn't exactly true, was it? He didn't know—didn't know—

He let out his breath in a sigh and replaced the drawing with the other sketches. He was going on this journey to find Gray, so to speak, but sitting here staring at the picture wasn't going to do any good. There were better things he could be trying to sort out now.

Pulling out three specific pages, he held them side by side to study them. These were new drawings that he had made after his brief stint as Gray. There was one for each of the three groups that he thought were important. One was for the people he knew to be Gray's parents, one for Lyon and Gray's dead master, and one for Fairy Tail. Each page had a wealth of material, from sketches to hurried scribblings of important information that he had managed to write down before losing again.

Perhaps most relevant to this particular situation, each group had a place or places as well, and these were what had set him on the trail to Isvan. There were sketches of a couple cities, both looking somewhat the worse for wear, a little house on a snowy mountainside, and the Fairy Tail guild hall. He didn't know everything, but he could arrange the groups in the order of Gray's parents, Lyon and Ur, and Fairy Tail. He logically knew that this was the chronological order of how these different groups had played out their roles in Gray's life. And since he had a chronological order, he was going to follow it in terms of where he was going first. The ruined city associated with Gray's parents was first. The cabin and city associated with Lyon and Ur were next. The Fairy Tail guild hall had been first, in a sense, since that was where he had been these past months, but it would also be last on this particular trip.

He still had a long way to go until he got there, so he took this time on the train to flip through the pictures and read through the notebook and try to figure out how these three groups fit together. He was searching for any clues he had missed, hoping that maybe something would jump out at him, waiting to see if anything would trigger a half-formed memory.

By the time he reached the borders of Isvan, he was no closer to figuring it out. He stood in the train station just inside Isvan's borders and looked around uncertainly. Where was he supposed to go now that he was here? He could board another train into the interior and hope for the best, but that would just be a shot in the dark.

Pulling out the page for Gray's parents, he studied the drawing of the burning city intently. Then he looked around and found an information desk that had some maps. He grabbed one of each and sat down on a bench to look through them. They mostly just showed different views of Isvan's interior, some more detailed than others. If he had a name to work with then he would be able to find his destination relatively easily, but he didn't.

Sighing, he made to fold up the map he had been studying, but then something caught his eye. He didn't know why, since the spot wasn't even labeled as a city, but something was calling him there. Gray was calling him there. Which sounded silly, except that Gray had called him to do things before. Gray had called him to go after Natsu and bring back the lost scarf when the dragon slayer had run away after the debacle with the memory mage's magic, Gray had called him to go after Erza and comfort her after he had made her cry, Gray had even called him to do little things for some of the others on occasion, when they seemed particularly melancholy.

It was an even subtler thing than the curse—just a slight tugging sensation, a quiet feeling that this was the right thing to do or the right place to go. Following Gray's instincts had worked out for him in the past, so he saw no reason to abandon them now.

He looked at the train schedule and saw that no train was going directly to that point—which would make sense, he supposed, since there was no city listed there—but he could take the one that would get him the closest and then walk the rest of the way. He nodded sharply and went to buy his ticket, new resolve shining in his eyes.

He was going to find Gray.

* * *

They knew where they were going—well, at least Lyon did—so they weren't exactly lost. But at the same time, they didn't know if Gray would even be there, so they could very well be on a fool's quest and end up with nothing to show for it.

It chafed at Natsu that he didn't even know if they were going in the right direction. Well, it would have chafed at him more if he wasn't currently dying of motion sickness. Strangely, the sickness didn't seem to be as overwhelming as usual once the train had started moving. He suspected that might be because he had already been feeling rather fearful and nauseous before the idea of the train had even crossed his mind, so his sickness could only increase so much.

He sat slumped against the window, his eyes closed as he rested his forehead against the cool glass. Across from him Lyon and Happy were talking in low voices, but Natsu was too heartsick and nauseous to really try paying attention. He absently reflected that those two were getting on much better than they had in the beginning. He supposed that it came from being stuck living together for so long. Then again, Natsu was getting along better with Lyon as well, and that had started even when he was still living with Gray instead of at his own house with Happy and Lyon. Just as well, he supposed. They made a better team when they weren't in a competition over who got to do what in regards to Gray.

The train lurched and Natsu suppressed a groan. His hand automatically went to tug at his scarf since sometimes it helped him feel a little better to be able to hold on to something he cared about, but as his fingers brushed against the dragon scales, they slipped underneath the folds of the scarf and caught on the chain underneath. Natsu opened his eyes and looked down as he deftly tugged Gray's necklace out into the open from where it had been hidden beneath his scarf.

He stared at it blankly for a few moments, absently rubbing his fingers across the cold metal pendant. This necklace had been Gray's equivalent of Natsu's scarf, and although wearing it brought the dragon slayer some small comfort, it also felt wrong. This was Gray's and Gray should have it.

Natsu had lost his scarf a couple times over the years, but he had always gotten it back. In fact, Gray seemed to be the one who usually brought it back to him. He had lost it during Tartaros and Gray had found it and returned it. He had been an idiot that one time after the disastrous attempt to revive Gray's memories with a combination of Rufus and Meredy's magic, and Gray had once again found it and brought it back. He had given it to Gray once as well, after his friend had fallen through the ice on their job up on Mt. Hakobe, and Gray had returned it once they had gotten back to the guild.

On the other hand, Gray had only lost his necklace twice, and each time it had been because of a tragedy. The first time, someone from the guild must have removed it from his body after he 'died', offered it to Lyon, and then held on to it for Natsu until the dragon slayer had returned, when it had then sat and gathered dust in the kitchen cabinets after Happy had hidden it. The second time, Gray had given it to Natsu as a farewell before he had slipped away again.

Maybe that was part of the reason why looking at it now made Natsu's heart hurt so badly, because nothing good had ever come of him having this necklace. He needed to give it back to Gray. Well, first he needed Gray to regain his memories and remember its importance. Gray had always been there to remind Natsu of what was important, had always been there to return to Natsu the important things that he had lost, and Natsu needed to return the favor. He couldn't let Gray go. Gray would never have given up on Natsu, so Natsu wouldn't give up on Gray. No, Natsu would definitely not abandon hope now, because Gray needed him.

Natsu closed his hand around the little metal sword and closed his eyes again. The movement of the train and the desire to escape the nausea eventually lulled him to sleep, but his fingers stayed clutched around the necklace the whole time.

They were still wrapped around it when the train ground to a halt and woke Natsu from his restless slumber. He silently slipped the chain back beneath his scarf and followed Lyon and Happy off the train. It hadn't been a short trip. It had, as a matter of fact, taken over a day, including a train ride through the night, and they had had to switch trains a couple of times since no train would go all the way from Magnolia to Isvan.

"Where are we now?" Natsu grumbled, waiting for the last of his motion sickness to die down as he stepped off the train and glanced around the station.

Lyon's eyes flashed with something akin to sympathy and Happy fluttered protectively by Natsu's shoulder. The dragon slayer eyed them warily for a moment, before figuring that perhaps they had noticed what he had been doing on the train. That might explain their odd behavior.

"We've actually been in Isvan for a little while now," Lyon said, glancing around. "But we're getting close. Now we just have to go the last few miles to Gray's hometown."

"When does the next train leave?" Happy asked.

Lyon was already shaking his head. "We aren't going by train."

Natsu breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh good." Then he frowned a little. "Why?"

Lyon's eyes clouded over and he looked away. "The city Gray grew up in was completely annihilated by Deliora. It was such a terrible tragedy that the city was basically turned into a graveyard. It was never rebuilt—it's just ruins now. Trains used to stop there at one point, but none have gone there in well over a decade. Actually, even the tracks were moved to give the city a wide berth. We'll have to walk."

The nausea Natsu had finally started getting rid of began creeping back again. Happy looked similarly horrified. It wasn't that this was completely surprising, per se, but it was a harsh reminder of Gray's past. And Gray had never really gone into a lot of detail about what had happened, so Natsu hadn't known it was this bad, even if he had suspected that it wasn't great.

"Well, I guess we might as well start walking then," he said quietly. He frowned over at Lyon. "You do know where you're going, right?"

Lyon turned away and began walking out of the station, his eyes fixed on the ground. "As if I could forget."

Natsu and Happy hesitated a moment longer and exchanged glances before following him. Natsu pushed aside his nausea and fear and grief for the moment. All he needed to do was focus on the present. He couldn't afford distractions right now, because he had a mission.

He was going to find Gray.

* * *

His first reaction at the sight of the ruined city was disappointment. Yes, he had gotten the feeling that Gray's birthplace was no longer really standing—the sketch he'd drawn while he had still retained some of Gray's memories made that obvious—but he had been hoping for something a little more impressive. Something that would trigger a wave of memories and emotions and finally give him a clue about who Gray had been. But he supposed that he should have known better, because the memories rarely worked like that.

It was snowing, and a dusting of white covered everything, partially obscuring it from view. All that was left of the city was rubble, crumbling chunks of brick and stone strewn across the ground in a wide radius, going as far as the eye could see. The city had apparently been a pretty decent-sized one. Occasionally a rotted, blackened piece of wood could be seen poking out from beneath the remains of a building, but although there must have been a lot of wood used in the construction of the city, not much could be seen here. He supposed that most of it would have rotted away by now, because although he wasn't sure how long ago this city had been destroyed, he was aware that it had been a long time.

Carefully picking his way through the rubble, he prowled the remains of the long-dead city, his eyes carefully searching for anything familiar or recognizable. Not much was coming to him, but then he paused beside one nondescript fallen building. It was crumbling with age, its bricks were lying cracked on the ground, and whatever wood had once supported it had long since rotted away. In short, it looked like every other building.

But something about it tugged at his memory. Or rather, something about it tugged at Gray's memory. For a moment he could feel the curse resisting, but then it seemed to give up without much of a fight, which puzzled him. Perhaps it was weakened because of how much they had fought earlier when he'd been Gray. Did it work like that? Usually the curse would—

The memories hit him hard and fast.

_He could hear the screaming and the pleading and the roars of the demon slicing through it all. He could see the fire devouring the buildings, its smoke rising to cloud the sky. The blood was everywhere, thick pools of crimson congealing on the ground and bright spatters of red painting the walls and streets. The bodies of people he had known and loved were lying in the rubble, while the demon towered above them and roared in triumph._

_And now it was coming towards him and he was too terrified to move. This was it, how he was going to die. But then suddenly his parents were there again, yelling at him to run as they pushed him out of the way. He stumbled to the side and turned back, desperately calling for them._

_And then the demon tore into them and he screamed as their blood spattered him._

_The demon turned clumsily, its large frame crashing into the building beside him and knocking it over. The structure groaned and started to collapse. He tried to get out of the way, but it was already too late. A support beam followed by a barrage of bricks fell down on him, and everything went dark._

The memory finally dissipated, leaving him gasping for breath, eyes wide. He shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself. That had been terrible. He felt a little bad that Gray had experienced something like that.

Oddly enough, this memory didn't fade the same way as the others. He waited for the curse to sink its teeth into it and drag it away, but for the moment the vicious little beast seemed uninterested in removing that particular memory. He didn't know why. Maybe it was worn out from all the memories it had been tearing away from him lately.

It should be a good thing because it gave him something to work with, but the truth was that no matter how much he thought about it and turned it over in his head, he still couldn't connect to it. It was terrible, but it was something that had happened to Gray. It must fit into this puzzle somewhere, but no matter which way he twisted and turned it, he couldn't jam it into place.

He sat down heavily on a nearby chunk of wall and stared blankly at the building that had triggered the memory—the building that had collapsed on top of Gray, he supposed. He sat there for what seemed like hours, not willing to give up on this newest lead but also unable to break out of the dead end it had led him into. Why couldn't he connect to this?

He thought back to when Natsu had been trying to get him to remember. In the void, Natsu had made him feel all the negative emotions, the pain and fear and grief, and that had jolted him into awareness in a way that the other emotions had not. While they had been using Rufus and Meredy's magic, Natsu had turned to showing him negative memories and emotions, and although it had eventually made him snap, it was also what had given him a breakthrough so that he started remembering bits and pieces. Natsu had thought that he needed to see and feel the bad things, and this newest memory could definitely be considered bad. It was horrible, terrible, and far worse than anything Natsu had shown him or made him feel before. So why didn't it work now when the same strategy had worked before?

It was a long time before it occurred to him that although Natsu had shown him the bad things, the dragon slayer had shown him the good ones as well. Natsu had shown him the good memories and feelings first, and when that hadn't worked, that's when the dragon slayer had turned to the bad ones out of desperation. He had just remembered that it was the negative memories and emotions that had triggered his progress, and had ignored the fact that he had seen the positive things as well, because they didn't seem to have worked.

But perhaps they  _had_.

He stood up and looked around uncertainly, not sure what exactly he was searching for. Letting out a breath, he let himself relax. He began walking through the snow and rubble, and although he didn't know where he was going, his steps were certain and unfaltering. He would just have to trust Gray's instincts again.

Because it occurred to him now that perhaps it wasn't the negative things that had pulled him out of his void-apathy or started the cascade of half-remembered memories. Perhaps it had been a combination of both the good and the bad. In the void, nothing had meaning. What was the meaning of life if there was not also death? What could existence possibly mean if there was no non-existence to stand against it? It was funny, but when he thought about it, few things had meaning without their opposite. But the converse was true in all cases as well, because if you couldn't have the good without the bad, you couldn't have the bad without the good either. Everything was just a flat, meaningless shade of gray otherwise.

He had wanted to focus on the bad because he had thought that was what was triggering his progress, and he also suspected that Gray may have had an exaggerated tendency to focus on the bad as well, perhaps because of all the tragedy he'd faced. But to get the full picture, to really understand Gray, he needed to know about the good things that had happened to Gray as well, because Gray had been as happy as he had been unhappy, had had as many good times as bad. He would never be able to understand Gray if he only had half the story.

_Here._

He paused and peered at the destroyed building in front of him. It didn't look like much, but something about it felt right. He hopped over the remains of an outer wall so that he could stand on what had once been the inside of the building—the house—even though what had once been a clear interior was now strewn with debris. He brushed some of the snow off the wall beside him, letting his fingers graze the rough, pock-marked stone as he studied it with interest.

This ruined shell, he realized, must have been Gray's house, once.

The memories didn't come as easily this time. The curse hadn't put up a fight with the memories of the destruction of Gray's city, but it wasn't going to give up the happy memories so easily. It hadn't been as active since that last sweeping attack on his memory, but it was starting to stir again now. But he was determined and he would fight, so he sat down right there in the middle of the ashes of Gray's childhood and fought for the memories that must have been made here.

There was nothing as dramatic as that last tragic memory, but maybe that was to be expected, because not everything in life was overly dramatic. Gray must have had some quiet moments too. Still, the longer he sat there, the more he could remember. He could see the smiles and hear the laughter and almost feel that sense of belonging that he hadn't really been able to feel since the void. And he felt like he was  _so close_ to being able to fit together Gray's mother and Gray's father and Gray. He could almost see how they connected, could almost feel what they had meant to each other, but not quite.

Not quite, because of that stupid curse. It hadn't bothered trying to pull away the earlier memory, but it was fighting to yank these ones back into oblivion. He wondered briefly what it did with the memories it stole. Could it destroy them entirely? Lock them in the void where he'd never be able to find them again? Sure he had been able to find pieces of Gray's memory from time to time, but once they'd been pulled away again…He didn't know if maybe the curse was capable of erasing the memories entirely. Maybe there were already pieces of Gray he'd never be able to find again because they no longer existed. He didn't want to think about that.

He wondered if maybe the reason the curse was fighting him more on the happy memories than on the tragic ones was because it liked nothingness and death—its name meant 'memory of death', didn't it? If it had perhaps been weakened enough from their earlier clash that it had to pick and choose which fights it pursued, then maybe it was just choosing to focus its efforts on removing anything positive. Because if he had to remember anything, it wanted him to remember the death and bloodshed. And if that was all he remembered, he would never be able to find Gray again.

He didn't really have time to speculate on all this now, not when he needed his full concentration just to fight to hang on to the faint whispers of memory that lingered here, but he scowled anyway. Hadn't the curse already done enough? He had accepted its presence and its effects because he hadn't thought that he had a choice in the matter, but he had come too far to give up now. The curse did not belong here, and he wasn't going to let it win again.

He needed to find that one thing that would give him some purchase and let him snap the pieces together so that they wouldn't fall apart and slip away again. He had managed to assemble some pieces into people and his knowledge of those people hadn't been lost again because he had found something to connect each individual to itself. If he could do that here, then he could hold together these people in their group.

Jumping to his feet, he hurriedly left the abandoned house behind and trudged through the rest of the city. He walked all the way to the edge of the ruins before he ran across what he thought he must have been looking for. In the snowy field beyond the perimeter of the wrecked city there were rows upon rows of wooden crosses and stone markers sticking out of the ground, and his first thought was 'graveyard'. But that couldn't be exactly right, because he rather thought that the whole city was a graveyard. Besides, if these had been from the time of the city's destruction, the wood would have been long gone, weathered by the elements and rotted away into nothing. These markers had obviously been replaced over the years, so someone must still care about what had happened here. Perhaps relatives of the deceased still came here on occasion to pay their respects? Well, maybe the word he was looking for was 'memorial', then.

A heavy silence lay over the area, and he moved as quietly as possible, wincing when his feet crunched over the snow or he stumbled over a hidden piece of debris. It felt wrong to break the silence, and even his breathing sounded too loud here. He bowed his head respectfully and silently drifted among the uneven rows of what he assumed were grave markers or at least some kind of memorial for the dead, occasionally glancing up to read the names and inscriptions that were carved into some of them.

A lot of memories must be held here, but not Gray's. Taking one last glance around, he shook his head and walked away, realizing that it was something else that he needed to see. Maybe Gray had had a marker here once, but there had to be another one, because that sense of connection wasn't strong enough. He let his feet carry him back through the rubble, not sure where he was going, but trusting that Gray was leading him there.

Wherever it was he was going, something else caught his attention before he'd made it. Pausing, he took a half-step back and peered at the cross he'd almost missed, hidden among the crumbled stones and fallen snow. It wasn't with the others, but it also wasn't Gray's. So why…Why did it have Gray's name on it?

He crept over to it and frowned. Reaching out, he let his fingers brush over the names carved on the wooden surface: Mika and Gray. Mika was certainly Gray's mother. He could feel that. But Gray couldn't have died here. Maybe that was why Gray's name was crossed out. But who would have…? Oh. He still had a few snippets of knowledge from the memories he had gotten of Gray's father before everything had fallen apart. Gray's father, who had thought that Gray was dead for years.  _Silver_ , his mind supplied. Once Silver had realized that Gray wasn't dead, the older man must have crossed out Gray's name.

He grimaced and wished that he could somehow magic those scratches away. Dragging his fingers across the gashes in the wood, he sealed them over with ice. It didn't have exactly the desired effect, but it was something. But the ice would melt, the scratches would remain, and Gray would stay dead anyway.

He averted his eyes and walked away, wishing he hadn't stumbled across the silent memorial. Forcibly pushing it out of his mind for the time being, he focused on the task at hand again. He kept on an unwavering course, and soon found what he had been looking for.

Funny how Gray's cross looked awfully similar to Silver's. The only thing different was the names. This one said Mika and Silver, and there were no out-of-place scratches marring its surface, although he could practically feel the invisible ones scribbled all over Silver's name. But they stayed invisible, because in the end, Silver had been dead again after all.

He studied the cross for a moment. In some ways it was a sign of death, but it was also a little like life in some ways too, wasn't it? Because he was here and he was alive, and Gray must have come here before to bridge the gap between those who were gone and those who were still here. Gray must have come back to bridge the gap because…

Because they were Gray's family, he realized. 'Family' had never meant much to him before aside from the dictionary definition of one's biological relatives, but here, staring at this last remembrance of Gray's family, the pieces finally started clicking quietly into place. It wasn't like he suddenly remembered everything, but he had finally found that bit of purchase to stop the curse from being able to pull away the things he had already found here, and he finally understood how that first group—Gray and Gray's parents—really fit together. This was Gray's family, not just in the biological sense, but in that loving way that he hadn't fully understood. Because how could he have really felt the sense of belonging and love that came with family if he hadn't even been able to understand the people who were supposed to make him feel that way?

The brief jolt of euphoria, that glimmer of love and belonging, faded quickly. The revelation made him feel suddenly numb and cold instead, because although he had finally figured this out, he had figured it out much too late. These people were long dead and gone. Even Gray was gone. Only he was left, and that seemed unbearably sad.

Without fully realizing what he was doing, he sank to his knees in front of the cross. Curling over on himself, he buried his face in his hands and cried, his earlier resolution crumbling away. He didn't know if these were Gray's tears or his own. He didn't know if he was crying for Gray's parents or for Gray or for himself or for something else entirely. But still, as he huddled in the snow with the ghosts of a past he couldn't quite remember swirling all around him in this city of the dead, he mourned for what had been lost and what had yet to be found.

* * *

Natsu's first reaction at the sight of the ruined city was faint horror. There really was nothing left. Nothing except jagged slabs of crumbling stone and other debris, and even that was mostly covered in a blanket of snow. Maybe when the snow melted the devastation would be more obvious, but for now the white powder gave the ruins an almost charming, fairytale-like quality that certainly didn't belong here.

And although Natsu had already known that the city had been destroyed by Deliora, seeing the devastation firsthand really hit close to home. At one point this had been Gray's home. At one point Gray had lived here with his family and he had been happy and he had been a  _child_. And then the demon had come and torn it all away, and Gray had had to grow up much too fast, had seen and experienced things that no child should ever have to. Yes, Natsu had already known that, but seeing this made his heart ache for his friend all the same.

"Wow," Happy whispered, his eyes wide as he surveyed the scene.

"Yeah," Lyon replied, his voice subdued. "He told me once that it only took Deliora a few hours to completely destroy the city. And this was never a huge city or anything, but it was fairly large. A lot of people lived here. Maybe there were some survivors in other parts of it, but out of all those people who lived here, Gray was the only one we found alive."

Natsu winced and averted his eyes from the ruin. It was terrible to think that an entire city could be wiped out so thoroughly in such a short time. For the first time, he truly realized exactly how close he had come to never meeting Gray at all, because the ice mage could have easily been one of the thousands of other victims here.

Then he let out a breath and shook his head sharply. He couldn't afford to get distracted by such dark thoughts now. They had work to do. His original plan had been to ask Lyon if he knew where Gray's house had been or even where he and Ur had found Gray, but he could see that that wasn't going to work here. The city was basically all just debris and hunks of old rock, to the point where it was difficult to make out one building from the next. Everything was so broken up and scattered that he doubted Lyon would be able to pick out any useful landmarks at all.

"Well, I guess we might as well search the area," Natsu said, trying to direct everyone's attention to the task at hand. "Happy, you search from the sky. It's been snowing so footprints would have been filled in if they were ever here, but you can look for any sign that he might've come through here. I'll sniff around, although I'm not sure my nose will be much good with all this snow. Lyon, you might as well just poke around and see if you can find any clues."

The others nodded and moved off into different directions, but no one said much. Something about the dead city seemed to discourage too much noise. Leaving Happy to scout from the air, Natsu walked in the opposite direction as Lyon, figuring that they'd cover more ground this way. What had once been roads were now strewn with rubble and debris, so picking his way through the city was something of a challenge and Natsu tripped more than once on a crumbling brick hidden beneath the snow. Once he couldn't catch himself in time and face-planted right into a large piece of rock, but he just picked himself up and kept going.

His keen eyes searched for any sign that Gray had passed through and he kept sniffing around to see if he could pick up his friend's scent, but it wasn't easy. For one, although the snow had stopped now, it had been falling pretty heavily the previous day and it had still been lightly snowing on their trek over here. If Gray had been here, all traces of his passing had been obliterated by the snow.

He inhaled sharply in another vain attempt to pick up Gray's scent, and immediately cursed and rubbed at his nose as the frigid air tore through his sinuses painfully. As if it wasn't already cold enough in this godforsaken wasteland. Natsu sniffed a little more tentatively, being more careful this time. He spent quite a while roaming the city as he searched, the ruins looking less charming and more grim as time wore on, but the snow had made this an almost impossible task. Once or twice he thought that he might have picked up a faint trace of Gray's scent, but he couldn't be quite sure that his brain wasn't just playing tricks on him.

"I didn't find anything," Happy said morosely, fluttering down out of the sky to perch on a rugged piece of broken wall in front of Natsu. "We've been here for hours. If we haven't found anything yet…"

Natsu blinked at him in surprise for a moment, not realizing that they had been searching that long. Then he sighed and shook his head. "Let's go find Lyon."

They found the Lamia Scale mage nearby in the crumbling maze, and he looked no more optimistic than they did.

"Nothing," Lyon said with a sigh. He looked over at Natsu. "You didn't smell anything?"

Natsu bit his lip as he considered that. "It's really hard to be sure with all this snow," he answered slowly. "I thought that maybe I picked up his scent a couple times, but it was so faint that I might have been imagining it. I've been so focused on him and I want to find a sign of him so badly that it could just be a trick of the mind. If I could find a place where he stood around the same spot for a while and he touched a bunch of stuff and there wasn't too much snow covering everything up, then his scent would be stronger and I might be able to tell for sure, but…"

Lyon and Happy looked torn between being hopeful and being disappointed.

"It would be impossible to tell if he stopped for long anywhere here," Happy pointed out, his ears flattening. "Everything looks the same."

"My thoughts exactly," Natsu replied unenthusiastically. "It's like looking for a needle in a very cold haystack."

He didn't want to admit to himself that this entire journey was basically the same thing. Trying to find Gray in such a huge place as Isvan really was like finding a needle in a haystack, and that was assuming that he had even come here at all.

"There might be one other place here that he would have gone…" Lyon said slowly, frowning thoughtfully at the ground. He didn't seem overly enthusiastic either.

"Where?" Natsu asked.

Lyon grimaced faintly. "Come on, I'll see if I can find it again. I don't know if it's even still here after all these years."

He took off walking without even looking back to make sure they were following. Natsu and Happy exchanged puzzled glances before shrugging and trailing after him. Natsu got the feeling that Lyon wasn't in a very talkative mood, so he stayed quiet as the other mage searched through the wreckage.

They walked the length of the derelict city, and when they finally broke free of the crumbling ruins, Natsu's eyes widened slightly. There were uneven rows of weathered wooden crosses and cracking stone markers all over the place.

"This is a graveyard?" he asked in horror, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "Are Gray's parents buried here?"

"Not exactly," Lyon said, his lips tightening involuntarily as he paused to survey the scene. "This isn't the graveyard—the entire city is. Maybe some of the residents who had family outside of the city were buried later, but for the most part…You don't understand how gruesome it was. There were so many bodies that it would have been impossible for us to bury them all and a lot of them were mutilated pretty badly. They stayed where they fell in the city. I think that people must have gone through to bury everyone eventually, but…It really is a city of the dead. It's no wonder Gray was so messed up."

Lyon's eyes clouded over and he crossed his arms over his chest as he stared blankly at the ground. "Gray's parents aren't buried here. He was in shock when we found him and we didn't want to go digging through corpses with him to look for his parents. I think he might have looked a little, but…He didn't find his father, and his mother was…Well, I think he might have found  _some_ of her."

Natsu felt sick at the thought of that, and he stared at Lyon in horror. Lyon also looked slightly nauseous and Happy didn't look much better.

"This was—This was just supposed to be a memorial of sorts, I think," Lyon said, clearing his throat. "I mean, most of the people were eventually just buried where they were found since there were so many of them and a lot of them were so torn up that they weren't recognizable and couldn't be claimed. Some of the people who came here afterward—the family and friends of the residents, I suppose, who were looking for their loved ones—started up a sort of bodiless graveyard. I didn't really know about it at the time since we took Gray and left, but I heard about it later.

"It started off as just finding some of the things lying around—broken boards and pieces of rubble, mostly—to set up as grave markers for missing loved ones. Some people might have found who they were looking for and buried them here, but a lot of people didn't. No, Gray's parents aren't buried here, but he had a specific marker that he set up for them, although that was before outsiders came in to set up all the rest of these. I think that's how most people did it: they would set up a marker in remembrance of their dead, even if they never found the actual bodies.

"I haven't had any reason to come back here over the years, but someone must have been maintaining this place. I suppose it's possible that some of the people who lost loved ones might come down here every once in a while if they still live nearby. I don't think most of these crosses and things were here before. Whatever original markers were here would have rotted away by now since most of them were wood, but some of these look like they're still in fairly decent shape."

The three of them stood there in silence for several long seconds, staring out at the field of empty graves. Natsu automatically reached up to tug at his scarf and wrap his fingers around Gray's necklace. They didn't bring him much comfort.

"That's horrible," Happy whispered finally, his voice cutting through the dead silence.

Lyon let out a breath. "Yeah," he said. "It is." He glanced around. "I don't remember which of these was Gray's and I don't know if he would remember that either at this point, but we might as well take a look around before we leave. It's hard to tell since the rest of these weren't here before, but I'm pretty sure his marker was alongside the city, so it was probably over there somewhere. But we also might be in the wrong place entirely, because I suspect that he might have set up a new one later."

He gestured vaguely ahead of them and then started trudging through the snow. Natsu followed more slowly, still feeling sickened and numb. Hearing about what had happened here made it all seem so real. Gray had always talked about the tragedies he had faced in the broadest possible terms, never going into much detail about the specific horrors. Natsu couldn't really blame him, but it was something of a shock to finally hear some of those details laid out so bluntly.

The rows of crosses seemed to close in around him, making it hard for him to breathe, but he forced himself to focus on looking for Gray. They eventually ended up just wandering aimlessly through row after row of markers since Lyon couldn't be sure which one they were really looking for. It was pretty depressing, to be honest. Natsu had originally started off reading some of the names and inscriptions on the markers to look for clues, but it wasn't easy to see the names of so many long-dead people. Many of the markers didn't have anything at all written on their surface, and that was almost even worse. It made him wonder about all the people who hadn't had any loved ones survive them, the entire families obliterated here with no one to remember them. Natsu eventually averted his gaze so that he didn't have to look at them anymore.

"Maybe he wouldn't have come here," Lyon said finally, coming up behind Natsu and Happy after they'd spent several minutes searching. "I think he must have made something more permanent later, but I don't know where it might be and I doubt it was here. I don't suppose you saw anything while you were wandering around the ruins?"

Natsu shook his head, but Happy hesitated.

"I thought I might have seen something that looked like a cross while I was flying," the Exceed said carefully, "but I didn't bother checking it to see if it had names or anything, because I figured it must be normal to have some of those around the city. You know, with how many people died here."

"Do you think you could find it again?" Lyon asked, cautiously hopeful but mostly pessimistic.

"Probably."

Natsu and Lyon followed Happy as the Exceed went about the chore of trying to remember where he'd seen one nondescript cross in a sea of wreckage. It took a while since there weren't a lot of landmarks to go by in this ruined city, and because Happy hadn't thought the cross was important at the time and so hadn't paid much attention to it. Mostly they just wandered around for a while until Happy flew down excitedly and pointed.

"Over there!" the feline said.

They hurried over to the weathered marker half hidden by snow and debris. Natsu sucked in a breath as he saw the names Silver and Mika scratched on the wood. Silver had been Gray's father, so Mika must have been his mother. And as he sucked in that breath, he could taste Gray in the air.

"He was here," Natsu said excitedly, leaning forward and inhaling to confirm that Gray's scent was all over this area, partially obscured by the cold and snow.

"Really?" Happy asked in surprise, some of his earlier horror leaking away in the face of this new excitement.

"Yeah. Well, I guess you were right, Lyon. It's not like he would have made this when he was here last. It must have been here before," Natsu added.

"Yes." Lyon grimaced. "It wouldn't surprise me if Gray still comes up here occasionally. I mean, it's possible that it was traumatic enough that he never wanted to come back, but…it seems likely that he's been up here at least once or twice."

Natsu frowned a little as he considered that. "He never said he was coming up here."

Lyon gave him a scathing look. "Do you really think that he would have told you that?" he asked dryly. "This is Gray we're talking about. I'm sure he's taken plenty of solo jobs over the years, and if he occasionally took a detour to come up here while he was out…This is all just conjecture, but it wouldn't be that surprising."

Natsu nodded slowly. Gray had taken mostly solo jobs before they had formed Fairy Tail's strongest team. Even now that they were in a team together, he had still taken solo jobs fairly frequently. And Lyon was right that Gray wouldn't have told them if he had planned to come up here. But Natsu wished that he would have, because this seemed like a terrible place to come to alone.

"Well, he was definitely here relatively recently," Natsu repeated, more subdued now. "I'd say not for several hours, but I think we might have made up a little time on him. It's hard to tell exactly how long it's been with all this snow muting everything though. And before you ask, no, I can't follow the trail. It already faded too much, and it wouldn't have been that strong to begin with."

"If it's been that long, then I doubt he's still hanging around here now," Lyon said with a sigh. "But it's good that we know we're on the right track, and it seems to indicate that he really does have some grasp of places that were important to him. Hopefully that means he isn't just wandering off to random places after all."

"Where are we looking next then?" Happy asked.

"Unless there's some place I don't know about that was important to him before I met him…Probably Brago. Or maybe the house we stayed in with Ur," Lyon replied.

"Which one is he the  _most_ likely to go to?" Natsu asked impatiently.

Lyon scowled again. "How am I supposed to know?" he snarled irritably. Then he took a deep breath to calm himself down and seemed to consider the question. "Ur's house is closer," he said finally. "We can go there first and then stop by Brago afterwards if we don't find him. We'll end up taking a much longer route if we pass up her house to go to Brago first and then have to come all the way back."

"I'm all for saving time," Natsu said with a shrug. "Lead on, fearless leader."

Lyon rolled his eyes and turned away, but he hadn't gotten more than a few steps before he paused. He didn't turn around, but when he spoke, his voice was quiet. "I'm sorry for snapping at you, Natsu. This place puts me on edge."

It put Natsu on edge too, but the dragon slayer imagined that it must be even worse for Lyon since the older mage had been around here at the time of the city's destruction and had seen it firsthand. Natsu didn't doubt that the place held unsavory memories for Lyon, and he wouldn't be surprised if the ice mage got even more wound up when they explored the places that had connected him to Ur. Putting that on top of the fact that Lyon was already terribly worried about Gray…Well, Natsu wasn't surprised that Lyon wasn't in a great mood.

"I know," Natsu said. "It's okay."

Lyon nodded slightly and started walking again.

"Natsu, I'm cold!" Happy whined.

Natsu considered telling the Exceed to fly it off to get some blood flowing, but instead he snatched the little cat out of the air and hugged him to his chest. He loosened his scarf so that he could partially wrap it around Happy as well, and after his initial exclamation of surprise, the Exceed sighed in contentment and burrowed into Natsu's arms. Natsu held him close and followed Lyon silently. As they left this city of the dead behind, he quietly mourned for what Gray had lost and prayed that they would find him again soon.

* * *

He had two places to choose from for the second group: the other city or the house in the mountains. Something told him that the city held all bad memories, so the good ones would have to come from the house. He obviously needed both, so the real question was which place he would go to first. Ultimately he decided that it would be better to go to the city first, because he'd rather get the bad stuff out of the way. He had seen the bad memories first here too, for Gray's family, before he had seen the good, and that had worked out fine. He didn't see any reason to change that pattern now.

So once he picked himself up off the ground and quietly slunk out of the silent ruins, he set off back in the direction from which he had come. Pulling out the second page with all the information about Lyon and Ur, he took a few moments to look it over, searching for any clues he might have missed. The word 'Brago' came to mind, and he hurriedly scrabbled around for the pen he always kept on him and wrote the name down in case the curse spirited it away. His suspicions about the word were confirmed when he pulled out the map of Isvan and found Brago listed as a city there. Since it had an actual marker on the map, he guessed that trains must still run there.

He hiked back to the train station he had used previously, bought a ticket to Brago, and settled back to wait, his body vibrating with anticipation and anxiety. He hoped that he wouldn't have to do too much more train hopping, because he was going to run out of jewels if this kept up. But this was important and money was the least of his problems right now.

When he arrived at Brago, he was pleasantly surprised to see that it was a fully-functioning city and not a ghost city at all. His sketch of it had shown it as a ruined mess, similar to the first one, so he had been a little apprehensive. But things couldn't be all bad if the city was still here and alive, so some of his anticipatory dread slowly seeped away and he relaxed a little. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as he had feared.

He drifted through the bustling streets with something like detached contentment, searching for anything even vaguely familiar. It occurred to him that if Gray had seen this place as a ruined shell then it might be harder to find the memories now that the city had been rebuilt and looked completely different. If any specific part of this place had held important memories for Gray, it would be hard to find. Sure enough, nothing was coming to him.

But then, after he had been wandering the streets for what felt like hours, he turned a corner and a demon suddenly seemed to appear out of the corner of his eye. His head jerked around and it was gone, but it rattled him. It must have been a whisper of a memory, but it had seemed far too lifelike, as if the demon had walked straight out of his head and into reality. He recognized this demon from the memory in the other city, and even from a few of the vague memory flashes he'd gotten over the past weeks. He wasn't sure that he wanted to see any more memories with it. The incident made him skittish and nervous, and he kept a wary eye out as he continued walking.

It was a little while later that the memories resurfaced fully. One moment he was frowning at a strange-looking building, and the next, the demon was back. It was the same demon from before—Deliora, something in his head whispered. Even the name made him shudder.

The bustling city seemed to shimmer and fade before his eyes, leaving only a desolate wasteland of broken buildings and leaping flames. And Deliora was there, tearing everything apart, but Ur was there too. All he knew was that he had to stop her because  _this was not supposed to happen._  This hadn't been the plan at all. She shouldn't even be here.

But there was nothing he could do because this had already happened. So he watched her use iced shell and he watched the ice seal the demon and he watched Ur die. And he didn't know why he felt so guilty—why  _Gray_ felt so guilty—since he wasn't sure what exactly Gray had to do with Ur using the spell, but deep down he knew that this was his fault—Gray's fault?—and he felt like screaming or crying or running away.

But she was gone, and there was nowhere to run to. And then Lyon woke up—where had Lyon even come from?—and was yelling and telling him that it was all his fault, and it  _was_ , he could feel it in his bones. But what could he do about it now? She was gone and Lyon was leaving and he was left here all alone. He was alone again and he was crying and he didn't know what to do now that he had killed—Gray had killed?—Ur.

He surfaced with a gasp, the memory sliding away to reveal that he was still in the heart of a very-alive Brago. His head was whirling and he was breathing much too fast and he could feel tears on his face. He stumbled backwards unsteadily until his back slammed into the wall of a building behind him, and he stared at the ground with blank eyes and tried to calm his hyperventilating, but it wasn't working.

A concerned passerby stopped to ask him if he was okay. He stared at her for a moment.

"No," he said.

And he ran.

He ran through the city, his feet pounding against the brick in time to his too-fast heartbeat. He wasn't sure where he was running to. He thought it might be more that he was running away.

This had been different. This had been scary. This wasn't just a half-forgotten memory of Gray's. This time it had felt like he was there, almost like he was Gray, and it frightened him. It had been so  _real_.

But at the same time, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. How could Gray have killed Ur? Ur had used iced shell of her own free will. So why did he feel so guilty? Why did Gray? He had felt it before, that feeling that he—Gray—had killed Ur, but he still didn't understand why he felt that way. Maybe there was still something he was missing here.

And where did Lyon come into this all? He had been vaguely aware that Gray had known Lyon as a child and that they must connect to Ur. He'd even seen flashes of memory and randomly remembered snippets of knowledge from that part of Gray's childhood, especially that time when they'd been on Mt. Hakobe and it had triggered all sorts of things. But the Lyon from those memories and the Lyon he knew now wasn't like the Lyon he'd seen here. The Lyon he knew now was trying to take care of him and was sad that he didn't remember, not screaming hateful things and leaving him all alone.

He didn't understand—didn't understand—

But maybe if he could find the good memories that went along with these terrible ones, then maybe he would start to understand better. That seemed to have worked before. He had been able to figure out Gray's family eventually. He could figure this out too.

He needed to go to the little house in the mountains.

* * *

They had two places to choose from: Brago or Ur's house. For the sake of efficiency and time, they went to Ur's house first. Lyon had been able to lead them to it without any problem, and Natsu was a little surprised that it was still in such good repair considering its owner had been dead for well over a decade now. When he commented on it, Lyon just gave him a flat look.

"We take care of it," the ice mage said tonelessly.

"What do you mean?" Happy asked uncertainly.

Lyon huffed out a breath and pushed the door to the house open, turning away so that he wasn't looking at Natsu and Happy. "I mean that I come up here occasionally, and I know that Gray does too. I didn't come back until years after Ur's death, but eventually I came back looking for closure. Didn't find it, obviously, but I fixed the house up since it had started falling apart by then, and after that I began stopping by once or twice a year to make sure that it stayed maintained.

"I don't think Gray ever came back until after Galuna though. Sometimes I see that things have been changed or fixed, so I know he must come up every once in a while, but I didn't start noticing those little inconsistencies until after we'd patched things up with each other. Maybe he came back after Galuna to look for closure or because it stirred up memories or something. I never asked. We came here together once though, on the anniversary of Ur's death."

Natsu's automatic reaction was to say that Gray had never told him any of this, but he bit it back, not wanting a repeat of what had happened in Gray's hometown. Besides, he wasn't really surprised that Gray wouldn't have told them this. And come to think of it, he couldn't say that he was surprised that Lyon still made sure this place was maintained either. After all, hadn't Lyon continued paying to keep Gray's apartment for over a year after the younger ice mage had 'died'?

So Natsu said nothing, opting instead to follow Lyon into the house silently. Their steps disturbed the light coating of dust on the floor, making it swirl up around them. Happy sneezed, and Lyon gave him an apologetic look.

"Sorry," the ice mage said. "I've been distracted with Gray these last few months and I haven't had time to come up here like I usually would. Although, to be honest, I never came back here after I thought he died."

"It's okay," the Exceed assured him.

They moved through the house quietly, searching for any sign that Gray might have been there. It was a pretty small building so it didn't take long to come to the conclusion that no one had been there in a long time, likely since Lyon had been here last. The thin layer of dust sprinkled across the objects in the rooms was undisturbed and the only footprints in the dust on the floorboards were from the present company's passing. Although Natsu could smell the barest hints of Gray every now and then, the scent was old and faded, only lingering in the upholstery and other cloth objects that were the best at capturing and holding on to odors. It was barely there at all. If Gray had ended up around here, he certainly hadn't come inside.

At one point Happy opened his mouth to ask if Natsu had found anything, but closed it again when he saw the dragon slayer's face.

"Happy, why don't you go fly around outside and see if you can spot any sign that he might be in the area?" Natsu asked quietly.

The little cat nodded and disappeared outside, leaving Natsu and Lyon to finish their hopeless search in silence. Natsu knew that Lyon knew that Gray hadn't been here, but he didn't comment on the fact that the older mage continued wandering around anyway. Lyon didn't say much and Natsu left him alone, figuring that this place must bring back memories.

It was only when Happy returned half an hour later with nothing to report that they finally admitted defeat. Natsu was discouraged. They knew that Gray had been in his hometown for at least a little while, so it would make sense that he would have come here too. But again, finding Gray in Isvan was like finding a needle in a haystack. Still, Natsu had been so sure that they would find some sign of Gray here.

Lyon glanced over, saw the glum expressions Natsu and Happy were wearing, and sighed. "There's still one more place we can try," he said, his lips tightening for a second before relaxing again.

Natsu stared at him for a moment and then nodded. He almost suggested that they wait here to see if Gray showed up, but he had never been a fan of waiting and there was no guarantee that Gray would ever come here at all. Better to go chasing after their last lead.

"Are we going to have to walk again?" Happy asked anxiously.

Natsu perked up a little. The less trains the better.

But Lyon was shaking his head. "No, it was rebuilt. The trains still run there."

Natsu sighed. Of course it was too much to ask for. But at the same time, he also wanted to get there as quickly as possible to search for Gray, so he would put up with the train for the sake of speed. Lyon was watching him with a raised eyebrow, and Natsu rolled his eyes and nodded.

They needed to go to Brago.

* * *

He paused outside the door of the little house for a moment, silently hoping that he would finally find what he was looking for here. He needed to find something to wash away the memories that Brago had left him with, something to offset the horror and make it all make sense. The city had raised as many questions as answers, and they weren't pretty questions.

It had taken him a long time to calm down after he had gone running out of Brago as if a demon was on his heels. The strangeness and realness of the memory had thoroughly shaken him, and there was something about running away that had let him vent his fear and eventually calm down once he was too tired to run anymore. But it had taken him a long time to reach that point, and since he had been more focused on running than on paying attention to where he was going, he had ended up somewhat lost and had had to wander around until he found the next city over. Maybe he could have retraced his steps back to Brago, but he  _did not want_ to go back there.

So he had found a different town that wasn't haunted by demons, and had realized that he still had another problem. Namely that he didn't know where he was going. Not that that was much different from how the rest of this trip had gone, but once again, he only had a hint of where he needed to be. All he had known this time was that he needed to go to mountains, so he had gotten a ticket to a town at the base of the closest range of mountains.

Once he had gotten there he hadn't been able to tell if these were the right mountains or not, so he had spent much too long aimlessly exploring them. And even though it had taken a long time and nothing had jumped out at him at first, he had eventually made it here. He wasn't sure if it was dumb luck or if he had had a little help from Gray, but it didn't really matter as long as he found the place.

He pushed the door open cautiously. He thought that this house held more of the good memories so it shouldn't be nearly as bad as the other places he'd been to, but he couldn't be sure and he was still skittish from what had happened in Brago. The house was small enough and didn't take long to explore. Nothing much caught his attention, although he felt memories starting to stir a couple of times. The curse was holding them back, and he wasn't surprised. He had expected this to be something of a struggle after what had happened in Gray's birth city.

So he settled down in one of the dusty armchairs in the living room and began the long, arduous process of fighting the curse for any snippets of memory he could find. He worked to hold on to them for as long as possible as he tried to piece them together. He worked at it with determination for a while, and after a couple hours he had finally begun making some progress.

The memories he found here weren't as innocently happy as the ones at Gray's old house. There were still good times to be found, but most of them had a dark edge that belonged to Gray. He suspected that it had something to do with what Gray had experienced with Deliora, because he couldn't imagine that Gray had been as carefree and innocent after that. All the memories of Gray's rebelliousness and simmering anger seemed to confirm that. He also found a faded wisp of memory where Gray was leaving and Ur and Lyon were telling Gray not to go, and he instinctively knew that this was a bridge to what had happened in Brago. He didn't pursue that memory too far, because he wasn't sure if he really wanted to open up that can of worms again.

He focused more on the good times. There were plenty of those to be found too, full of laughter and snow and ice. The mix of good and bad puzzled him. What had Gray really thought of Lyon and Ur? Because he thought that Gray had really cared about them, but that anger and grief was always lurking below the surface as well. It was an odd combination, and it made it harder for him to fit the pieces together.

Then he forced himself to really think about how Gray had felt in Brago as compared to here. The fear and pain and guilt Gray had felt when Ur used the spell, combined with the grudging love and admiration that lingered here in the house, suggested that Ur had been important to Gray. She had been—she had been—

He scowled in frustration. He felt like he was  _so close_  to figuring it out. It was somewhat similar to Gray's feelings toward his parents, but it was different too. He wasn't exactly sure what to make of it. Wasn't exactly sure what Ur had meant to Gray.

It occurred to him that part of the problem might be that he wasn't looking at the bigger picture, because Lyon had also been included in this group. He still didn't know what to make of Lyon. Gray's feelings toward Lyon ranged from irritation to anger to bitterness, but there was also a lot of respect and friendship and…something a little deeper than friendship that he didn't really understand. The positives surely outweighed the negatives here, which should be a good thing, but it only confused him more because the Lyon in Brago had seemed like an entirely different person.

He thought that he was maybe starting to understand Ur a little bit, but he couldn't put the pieces together because Lyon had also been a part of this puzzle and he couldn't reconcile the Lyon here with the Lyon at Brago with the Lyon he knew now. And he didn't know how to figure that out, but—

He paused. Everyone else he had been searching for was already dead, but Lyon was still alive. If he went and found Lyon now, maybe he'd be able to solve this mystery already. Lyon would be at Fairy Tail. This was convenient, because he needed to go back to the guild anyway—they were the third group, after all. So he would try to puzzle out Lyon and this second group, and then figure out the third. He nodded sharply, satisfied with his plan.

It was time to go back to Fairy Tail.

* * *

Natsu paused on the outskirts of Brago for a moment to take in the bustling city, silently hoping that they would finally find Gray here. Beside him, Lyon was tense and jittery. Natsu considered asking him if he was alright, but brushed it off. He supposed that this city held a lot of bad memories for the other mage, even if it looked different from before.

"It's big," Happy said doubtfully, his tail drooping in discouragement as he studied the city.

Natsu heard what the Exceed wasn't saying. If Gray was here, it would be damn near impossible to find him. Brago was larger than the dragon slayer had expected and it looked like there were thousands of people out and about. His heart sank, but he wasn't going to give up without at least looking around first.

"We've got a lot of ground to cover," he agreed neutrally, rather than voicing his own concerns.

"It's bigger than it used to be," Lyon muttered. "It must have grown over the years."

"I guess we had better split up," Natsu said unenthusiastically. They'd never be able to cover the whole city if they all stuck together.

"We'll need a meeting point," Happy replied immediately.

Natsu shrugged, seeing the truth in that. "Why not right here?" he suggested. They were just outside the city so it wasn't as crowded as the inner city, and it wouldn't be so hard to find again since they could just walk straight out of Brago and then skirt around it as needed until they found the meeting spot. "Guess we should set up a time to meet too," he added with a sigh. "It'll take a long time to search. We'll need hours."

"If we haven't found him in four hours, meet back here," Lyon said shortly. "We're running out of time as it is. We're supposed to be heading back to Fairy Tail already."

Now with a plan in mind, the three of them split up to search different parts of the city, each realizing that their task was almost impossible. Happy was searching from the air as usual, but Natsu knew that it would be difficult for him to spot Gray amidst the throngs of city dwellers on the streets, even if their friend was here. Lyon had about a snowball's chance in hell of magically stumbling across Gray, and Natsu wasn't much better off. His nose wouldn't do much good here. It was already clogged up with the mingled scents of hundreds of pedestrians and the wafting odors from the food vendors lining the streets. Gray could have walked through here five minutes before and Natsu wasn't sure that he'd be able to pick up his scent. It would be masked completely within moments.

The hopeless search of the city was one of the most discouraging experiences of this whole desperate trip. Natsu wandered for hours, looking for any sign of Gray, but he found nothing other than a couple false alarms when he glimpsed someone with black hair who had Gray's approximate height and build. He trudged back to the designated meeting spot despondently, his sandaled feet dragging wearily along the ground as he walked.

He ended up leaving Brago by the wrong exit, and had to walk around the outside of the city until he finally spotted Lyon and Happy waiting for him. Happy looked tired and miserable, and Lyon was standing with his arms crossed as he surveyed the city with unreadable eyes. The ice mage's face was pinched and tight, and he didn't even look up when Natsu stopped beside him.

"Nothing?" Happy asked.

"Nothing," Natsu confirmed with a sigh.

Lyon still didn't move and Natsu considered trying to prod him into speaking or moving or  _something_ , but he thought that might be a bad idea. Instead, he picked Happy up and watched Lyon in silence, waiting for the other man to break himself out of his reverie. They were standing there for a few minutes before Lyon finally spoke.

"I was unconscious when Ur used iced shell," he said flatly, "because I had tried to use the spell first without fully realizing the consequences, and she knocked me out to stop me. When I woke up, Gray was just sitting there crying. I asked him where Ur was, and he told me that she was dead."

He paused and Natsu stayed silent, waiting for him to say what he needed to say. It must be hard for him, being in the place where Ur had died.

"I didn't want to believe him at first," Lyon continued after a few seconds. "I said he was lying, but he obviously wasn't. And it was so goddamn unbelievable that I didn't know what to do with myself, so I pushed him over and yelled a little bit, and all he would say was that he was sorry.

"And you know what I did?" he asked, a hint of bitterness creeping into his voice. "I told him that it was his fault. I told him that he killed Ur. And then I left. I just…left. It didn't matter that I knew that he had no one left, that everyone he had loved was dead. I was angry and grieving and I blamed him, so I walked away and left him there crying."

He lapsed into moody silence. Natsu bit his lip, finally realizing that it wasn't just Ur's death that had been bothering Lyon since they had come to Brago. Maybe with how caught up they all were with Gray these days, it wasn't so surprising that Gray was still on Lyon's mind even now. And with all the things left unsaid and all the past tragedies that had been stirred up over the past few days, perhaps it wasn't entirely surprising that Lyon was regretting what he had done to the other mage. But what struck Natsu most about the story was that Lyon had the same regret that Natsu himself did: they had both left Gray when their friend had needed them.

"It's not really your—" Happy started sympathetically, trying to make Lyon feel better.

"Happy," Natsu interrupted, his voice quiet but firm.

The Exceed broke off and looked up at Natsu with puzzled eyes. The dragon slayer shook his head slightly, and although Happy didn't look like he understood why Natsu wanted him to be quiet, he didn't try speaking again.

The situations weren't really the same, but Natsu had some idea of what Lyon was feeling. He had felt something similar when he had come back from his training trip and was told that Gray was dead. Everyone had told him that it wasn't his fault and that Gray would have understood, but he hadn't wanted to hear that. He hadn't wanted the comfort and sympathy and all the sugarcoated half-truths. He hadn't wanted to be treated like glass and hadn't wanted to be told what was and wasn't his fault. He had just wanted to mourn in peace, maybe have someone listen to him quietly without continually interjecting that it wasn't his fault and that there was nothing he could have done. And although he wouldn't admit it out loud, he and Lyon were very similar in some ways.

"That was a pretty terrible thing to do," Natsu said bluntly.

Happy hissed out a protest, but Natsu ignored him. He wasn't going to sugarcoat things. It wouldn't help Lyon any, and Natsu rather thought that if the other mage had wanted them to tell him that everything was alright, he wouldn't have presented the facts so baldly.

"Yes," Lyon replied quietly. He didn't seem to take offense at Natsu's words, instead opting to gaze out at the city sightlessly.

"I left him too," the dragon slayer continued, his lips tightening slightly. "I didn't know what the consequences would be when I left, but there were definitely repercussions. We both screwed up and our actions had consequences for Gray, whether we meant them to or not. There's just no getting around that.

"But…" He sighed. "Do you remember that one time when Meredy and Jellal were first leaving, when I tried to be clever and Gray totally shot me down and told you guys that I had stolen the quote from his landlady?"

Lyon finally looked over at him with a faint frown. "I remember it vaguely, I guess," he said slowly, obviously unsure of what this had to do with anything.

"Do you remember what it was that I said?" Natsu asked.

Lyon shook his head slowly. "Not really."

"When she dropped by to check in on us, she could tell right away that I was feeling guilty about something," Natsu said, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the ground. "And I told her about how I had left Gray to die. And what she told me was that she had lived long enough to come to the conclusion that people always left for one reason or another, but you could tell who cared about you by whether or not they came back again."

Natsu looked back up at Lyon. "And we came back, didn't we? It doesn't erase the choices we made or get rid of the consequences of those choices or make everything better again, but it's something. It doesn't magically fix what happened, but it gives us the opportunity to try making up for it, to try cleaning up the mess we made. We could have chosen to stay away, but we came back, and we fought to make things right because we cared about him.

"And before you bring up the whole thing with Galuna Island as an excuse, it doesn't change the fact that you eventually came back to try making things right," Natsu added. "Yeah, you really hurt Gray. He was really shaken up after Galuna. But… I don't know if you ever apologized or said that you forgave him, but he figured it out. He knew that you were trying to make things up to him, and he was a lot happier once you came back into his life to stay. I know you two are always trying to pretend that you annoy the hell out of each other and don't really like each other that much, but we can all tell that it's mostly an act. He'd get really excited every time you came to visit. He always tried to play it off, but it was nice to see him like that since he could get moody sometimes. He was always happy to see you because he still cared about you a lot, and I think that he was a lot happier when you finally made it clear that you still cared about him too.

"Yeah, you left. You had your reasons for leaving just like I had mine, and they were valid reasons. And like every other choice, the choice to leave had consequences. But we're back and we're fighting for him and there's no point wasting energy regretting the past when we could put it to better use trying to fix things now. He understood why you left and he forgave you for it, just like you forgave him for his mistake that ultimately resulted in Ur's death. Now it's time to put the past behind you and focus on the present."

Natsu and Lyon stared at each other wordlessly for a moment, and then Lyon's eyes misted over and he looked away.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, you're right."

"I know I am," Natsu replied. "I'm always right."

Lyon laughed breathily and ran a hand through his hair. "Well, we aren't going to find him here," he said, his voice suddenly steady and businesslike. "We need to go back to Magnolia."

Natsu's eyes widened slightly and he shook his head. "No, we haven't found him yet. We can't go back. We know that he was in his home city at least. He's around here somewhere. We can't just leave him here."

Lyon sighed tiredly. "We told everyone that we'd meet back at the guild in five days. As it is, we're already going to be a little late getting back. We can't just ignore the scheduled meeting."

Natsu opened his mouth to protest, and Lyon hurried to forestall him.

"Besides, you know how impossible it is to find him up here. We're just running around blindly in the hopes that we'll randomly stumble across him. But if we go back and tell the others what we've found, we can regroup and bring backup. We have a better chance if we get the rest of the guild to help us in the search."

Natsu clenched his hands into fists reflexively, knowing that Lyon was right but not wanting to admit it. Going back now felt like giving up.

Lyon's eyes softened. "This time it's Gray who left," he said quietly. "We just have to trust that he still cares about us enough to come back. And despite everything that's happened and all the trouble he's been having, I believe that he still cares about us and I trust that he'll come back when he's ready. Do you?"

Natsu let his breath out slowly. Yeah, he did trust Gray and he did think that his friend would come back when he was ready, because he couldn't imagine Gray—even a Gray with few memories who wasn't quite sure what to make of Fairy Tail—ever abandoning them. He  _did_  trust Gray, it was just that…Well, he never had been very good at letting go or giving up.

But he  _had_  also expressed trust in Gray, hadn't he? Last time, Gray hadn't let him fall through the ice. Natsu would just have to take that first step out and trust that the ice would hold again.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Okay."

It was time to go back to Fairy Tail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tend to get annoyed by the whole "and they just missed each other thing", but I liked how the parallel POVs worked here. Originally I wanted Gray to do all this on his own and get back before FT sent out search parties, but Isvan didn't seem like a day trip. I'm hazy on the actual geography and stuff, so I left the travel and timeline deliberately vague. That being said, Natsu and co. would have actually passed Gray up at some point, probably around the time they went to different places, so they'll get back to FT first. There are a lot of places where Gray would have fallen behind - it's just not super obvious because the alternating POVs don't switch to show the shift.
> 
> Yeah, the part with Gray's hometown got kind of dark. The graveyard thing was based on something I saw in canon, although I expanded it a lot. During the flashbacks on Galuna in the anime, we see Gray putting flowers by basically a board sticking out of the ground, which I originally thought was a grave until we later found out that Keyes ran across Silver's body so Gray's dad couldn't be buried there. There were similar-looking markers in the background so I just kind of assumed that maybe other people had done something similar. Probably I read too much into it, but eh. Whether Gray ever went back afterwards is debatable, but I switch back and forth depending on what better suits my needs. I wanted him to have come back here because it's a kind of poignant contrast, I think, seeing a sort of physical sign of how connected he was to his past before as compared to how out of touch he is with it now that his memories are gone. And I wanted him to start putting pieces together because of some kind of marker that he had set up himself, so regardless of whether or not that cross was set up after Tartaros in canon, I wanted it set up beforehand here.


	26. Ch 25-Gray finally comes home

* * *

**Chapter 25**

_(In which Gray finally comes home.)_

* * *

The journey back to the guild wasn't a terribly pleasant one, and not only because Natsu was motion sick the whole way there. Going back when they hadn't found Gray yet was wrong and frustrating, and Natsu wasn't the only one who was quiet and out of sorts on the train. The atmosphere was thick with disappointment and tension and worry, and the knowledge of their failure hung over them heavily.

To be honest, the atmosphere at the guild wasn't much better. The three of them trudged into the guild hall half a day later than they were supposed to have returned, and the building was already crowded with glum, disheartened faces, although it seemed like quite a few people were missing. It was Erza who spotted Natsu and his companions first.

"You're late," she said, although she didn't actually sound angry. Natsu glimpsed a hint of relief in her eyes, but also disappointment. Relief that they were safe and their tardiness didn't mean that something had happened to them, and disappointment that they hadn't found Gray and brought him back. "You didn't find anything?"

Natsu bit his lip as he considered how to best answer that. They  _had_ found some signs that Gray had been up in his hometown, but then they had lost him again. That was perhaps the most frustrating thing of all, that they had been so close and gotten their hopes up, but then never caught another break. And even though they had known that Gray must have been up there somewhere, even that knowledge hadn't been enough for them to find him. That one chance discovery hadn't changed the fact that it was ultimately nearly impossible to run across one lone amnesiac who didn't want to be found in such a vast land. It was like confirming that there was indeed a needle in the haystack, but still being unable to actually find the needle itself.

"We do have some news," he said slowly, "but no, we didn't find him."

Erza blinked at him in surprise, evidently not expecting them to have found anything at all. "Wait, let's gather everyone here first so that we can all hear it at once. You were the last ones to return and everyone else has already come back from their individual searches in outlying areas, but a few people decided to keep wandering around the city while we waited for you."

She smiled sheepishly. "And I made them all take a communications lacrima with them this time," she added with a rueful laugh. "If we had been thinking more clearly a few days ago instead of panicking, we would have sent one up to Isvan with you. It would have really helped with coordinating the search."

Natsu stared at her for a moment. "That would have been really useful," he replied, wondering why they hadn't thought of such an obvious solution to their problem. Not that he'd really been in much of a state to think anything through clearly when he'd first realized Gray had disappeared, but they could have saved a lot of trouble if he had sat down and thought things through instead of running off immediately with only the most basic of plans.

If they had just brought a lacrima with them, they could have sent a message back to Fairy Tail that they had found signs of Gray, and the guild could have sent backup without Natsu and the others ever having to come back. Natsu let out a breath. It was too bad, really. They could have still been searching right now, like he had wanted to.

He noticed that Lyon's lips also tightened in a fair approximation of annoyance, but the Lamia Scale mage just let out a harsh breath and shook his head. "Well, we're here now," he said with a sigh. "We'll make sure to bring a lacrima when we go back."

Erza's eyebrows shot upward and a faint gleam of hope entered her eyes. "When you go back?" she asked.

Despite himself, Natsu chuckled a little. "Now, now, Erza, we said that we weren't going to talk about this until we got everyone together," he teased.

She scowled over at him, but then sighed and nodded. "I'll be right back."

Natsu watched as she hurried across the guild and disappeared into the backroom, a lacrima already in her hand. He had the feeling that everyone else would be showing up shortly, unwilling to risk Erza's wrath. But he didn't have a whole lot of time to think on it, because half the guild was already here. Judging by the immediate onslaught of questions, they had been waiting impatiently for Natsu and his group to return. Which he supposed wasn't terribly surprising, considering the fact that his team might have had the best shot of finding Gray.

But he was under orders not to share what they had found until everyone else was here too, and he didn't dare say anything about their trip until Erza was here to hear it. He didn't have a death wish. Instead, he, Lyon, and Happy were ushered to a table to sit down, and Mira brought them drinks while everyone else took turns relaying their stories of their specific missions, giving a brief rundown of everything they had been up to over the past few days. Apparently everyone else had already met up and discussed their findings—or the lack thereof—while they were waiting for Natsu and the others to show back up. Now they were determined to get Natsu and his team up to speed.

Not that there was really much to tell, since no one had found much of anything. Not even Gajeel's team hadn't found anything, even though they had started off at Gray's apartment, which was the only place they could say that Gray had been with any real certainty. Still, Natsu quite enjoyed Levy's retelling of how Gajeel had led them around the city in giant loops as he tried to follow Gray's trail. The mental image of Gajeel running around on a wild goose chase, sniffing like a dog and getting frustrated as Gray outsmarted him time and time again, put Natsu in a slightly better mood, at least until Gajeel helpfully pointed out that Natsu had done the exact same thing when they had first realized that Gray was missing.

There were a few other entertaining stories as well that his friends were eager to share, which was probably more an attempt to lighten the mood than anything else. They seemed determined to try forgetting about the lingering tension and frustration, at least for a few minutes until Natsu told his tale and they could get back down to business. Natsu particularly liked Lucy's story of how Loke's womanizing had derailed their entire search. Apparently they'd been in a small town a couple hours away and had randomly run across a few of Loke's old flames, who immediately recognized their one-time lover and caused such a fuss that both Loke and Lucy had been temporarily detained while the town officials tried to figure out what was going on. They had been subsequently released with an apology and a polite but firm request to leave and not come back.

Lucy was indignant and kept shooting irritated looks at the unconcerned spirit, but not even that could cloak the underlying worry lurking in her eyes. Even Loke's apparent nonchalance was undermined by the tension radiating from him, and although everyone laughed and joked about the incident, it was obvious that no one could quite forget the situation they were in or the fact that they had completely failed to find their missing friend.

In any case, Natsu wasn't surprised by the disappointing results. After all, he had scented Gray in Isvan. Although they hadn't actually been able to find him, the dragon slayer knew that Gray must have been in Isvan for at least part of the time. In which case, it would have been awfully hard for anyone else to find him around Magnolia.

He also quickly realized that they weren't only waiting for Fairy Tail. As more of the scouting teams began trickling in, he began noticing a mixed assortment of mages. Natsu, Lyon, and Happy had pretty much run off as soon as the initial panicked meeting had been adjourned, because they wanted to find Gray  _now_ and weren't interested in sticking around to see how things worked out back at the guild. Now Natsu could see that this had turned into a much bigger venture than he had anticipated.

Apparently Erza really had contacted Sting and Rogue, because Natsu spotted them slinking back into the guild hall in defeat a few minutes later. They had come in separately since they had each led a different group, and Natsu noted with interest that Minerva, Rufus, and Yukino were there as well, along with Frosch and Lector. Meredy and Jellal had also apparently stuck around to help out in the search. Even Gray's landlady ended up hobbling into the hall after a bit. And was that Porlyusica over there, talking to Wendy?

Natsu was dying to ask what she was doing here given her misanthropic impatience with such things, but restrained himself. He didn't want to be on the wrong end of her sharp tongue again; he had gotten far too many biting lectures from her over the past months. Instead he settled for glancing over at Lyon and arching a questioning eyebrow.

The ice mage just shrugged. "Why don't you ask?"

"Because she would rip my head off," Natsu grumbled. "Why don't you ask instead? She doesn't hate you as much."

"She hates everyone," Lyon answered with a hint of amusement. "And I don't want to get on her bad side. So no."

Natsu rolled his eyes but subsided. It wasn't like he cared  _that_ much. He was willing to sacrifice his curiosity for the sake of his continued survival. But apparently Happy had other ideas.

The Exceed stood up. "Natsu wants to know—" he started loudly, before Natsu hastily clamped a hand over his mouth.

Porlyusica glanced over suspiciously and Natsu hurriedly turned away and forced Happy to look away as well, so that they wouldn't draw her attention. Although Happy had pretty much managed to draw  _everyone's_ attention, since he had been speaking as loudly as possible without actually yelling.

"Natsu wants to know…what?" Lucy asked with a puzzled frown.

"Nothing," the dragon slayer grumbled, scowling at Happy, who was looking much too smug.

He released the little cat, and Happy settled back down without protest. The Exceed didn't say anything else, but he was wearing a self-satisfied smirk. Natsu rolled his eyes and let out a breath. Of course Happy would pick  _now_ to finally perk up and go back to his normal mischief-making self. Then he shot his friend a suspicious look as it occurred to him that perhaps this had just been Happy's way of trying to snap him out of his brooding. The Exceed just looked back with innocent eyes, but there was something knowing in them as well. Natsu nodded to him slightly, before turning away as Erza marched up to the table.

The requip mage had been running around for the past couple hours, doing whatever it was that de facto guild masters did when panicking and trying to coordinate a massive manhunt. She had been tense and jittery and hadn't stayed seated for more than a few minutes at a time, instead continually disappearing to do whatever it was she was doing. Natsu didn't ask, because he understood how stressed out she was.

"Alright, everyone is finally here," she said, her tone all business as she looked around the motley gathering.

Natsu figured that it was about time. They had been waiting for a few hours now, because apparently a few teams had ended up drifting outside the city limits to nearby towns so it took them longer to get back. And to top it off, one team had managed to lose their lacrima and had decided to keep on searching instead of going back to the guild. It had taken a while for a search party to track them down, and Erza had not been pleased.

Natsu glanced around at the assembled mages and non-mages alike. It was kind of touching, really, how so many people who didn't normally interact with each other on a daily basis had still shown up to give their support, out of love for Gray and the rest of Fairy Tail. It was kind of funny, actually. Gray had been so worried that his condition was tearing the guild apart, and there was definitely some truth to that. The guild had definitely been a different place since his return from the void and everyone had been stressed and upset. Team Natsu had all but disbanded, each member preoccupied with their own separate roles instead of sticking together, and the changing dynamics had spread to the rest of the guild as well.

But in some ways this whole experience had seemed to bring the guild closer together as well, and had even drawn in some people who were normally outsiders, such as the Sabertooth mages, Meredy and Jellal, Porlyusica, and even Gray's landlady. And, of course, Lyon had gotten dragged into it too, and had become a lot closer to Fairy Tail over these past few months. They were a peculiar little group, but they'd put aside their differences to focus on working together towards a common goal. For all the bad that had happened, there was still a silver lining.

It buoyed Natsu's spirits for a few moments, before Erza turned to look at him expectantly. It was nice, but not nice enough to overshadow what had happened to Gray. It didn't change the fact that Gray had no memories, that he was missing, that he was lost and confused, that everyone was shaken up and upset and sad. But then again, maybe it went back to what he had been telling Lyon at Brago, because maybe these things couldn't magically fix their problems, but that didn't mean that they couldn't help start patching things up. It seemed pointless to throw away the good just because of how overwhelming the bad seemed. Natsu automatically reached up to finger his scarf, a silent reminder of that lesson.

"Care to fill us in, Natsu?" Erza asked.

Natsu sighed and briefly outlined his team's activities over the last few days. He glossed over some of the more personal things and tried to keep most of his frustration and discouragement out of his voice. He focused mainly on the fact that he was confident that Gray had at least visited his hometown, even if they hadn't found any sign of him at Ur's house or Brago. He didn't want to tell them how much of a shot-in-the-dark the search had been because he didn't want them to give up on it yet. Yes, the task of actually locating Gray by searching the entirety of Isvan seemed daunting and kind of hopeless, but that wasn't a reason to give up. Natsu still wanted—needed—to go back and continue the search. It didn't matter how bad the odds were, as long as he was doing something to find Gray and bring him home.

And he wanted the others to come help the search effort and poke around Isvan with him, so although he was honest with them about the fact that the whole situation was like searching for a needle in a haystack, he tried not to be too obvious about how almost-impossible it really was. Then again, he wasn't sure how much that really mattered, because even if there were a few dissenters and voices of reason, he was pretty confident that most of the guild would jump on this chance, however slight, even if they knew exactly how impossible it was.

Sure enough, everyone's hopes started rising as Natsu told them that they had at least found evidence of Gray's passing, and once he had finished the story, a debate sprang up about how to best conduct the search. They plotted and schemed for quite a while, talking about the logistics. Someone even ran out to acquire maps so that they could plot out different routes and pinpoint the places where Gray might be the most likely to go. They talked about what supplies they would need, who should be teamed up with who, and who should take what route.

And a couple hours later, when they were finally done planning everything they could possibly plan, Natsu was satisfied. The task was still daunting, but it would be more bearable with his friends helping out. Even if it would still be hard to locate Gray, they had a much better chance of it now. Despite Natsu's knowledge of the odds they were facing, he was actually starting to feel cautiously hopeful

"Well, let's go find Gray," he said, his eyes flashing with determination.

But it turned out that they didn't have to, because that was the moment that Gray burst into the guild hall.

* * *

The journey back to the guild wasn't a terribly pleasant one, and not only because he was still confused and a little panicky over what had happened in Brago. Mostly it was because he had to fight the curse the whole time. He had been able to fit Gray's family together into a neat little unit, and that knowledge and understanding had allowed him to remember what he had discovered without the curse taking it away. The curse could steal away all those only half-understood snippets of knowledge and feeling, but it wasn't nearly as effective at pulling away the memories that he well and truly understood and had pieced together.

But he hadn't been able to really figure out the relationship between Gray and Ur and Lyon, so the curse still had something to sink its teeth into there. He had to fight to hold together all the little scraps of information and knowledge that he had started fitting together from Brago and the cabin, because the curse was trying to rip them away again. He just needed to hold on long enough to find Lyon and work out how the older ice mage fit into this whole mess, because he thought that it was his inability to understand the different sides of Lyon and the different relationships between Lyon and Gray that was preventing him from fitting that whole second group together. Plus he still had to figure out how Fairy Tail fit into this, but he would worry about that after he got the second group sorted out.

He jumped off the train as soon as it hit Magnolia and practically flew through the streets, desperate to get to the guild and figure this out before he lost the progress he had made. He could already feel it starting to fade at the edges and slip away, and he couldn't bear the thought of losing it all again, not when he was so close.

So he was already panicky and hyper-focused on the task at hand when he flung open the doors of the guild hall. There was a moment of stunned silence as everyone took in his sudden arrival and disheveled appearance, and then everyone started jumping up and talking at once. They were asking him if he was okay, asking what had happened, asking why he had left and if he had managed to find any more memories. And a lot of them were hurrying towards him, but he could not afford to be distracted right now, not when he was right on the edge of either forgetting everything or remembering it all.

"Stop," he said tightly, his eyes darting around the room as he took a half-step back away from the sudden onslaught. "Just…stop. Wait. Please."

Everyone paused again, and Natsu quietly told them all to stay back and give him space, even though the dragon slayer looked just as close to running over to him as the others. He appreciated it, figuring that Natsu must have been able to pick up on something or other in his voice or eyes.

But it wasn't Natsu he needed to find right now, so he looked away, frantically searching the room with his eyes. He first noticed that there were an awful lot of people here, even people that weren't part of Fairy Tail and weren't normally here. He wondered why they were all here now. As he hastily skimmed over the faces of both Fairy Tail mages and usual outsiders alike, he noticed that many of their expressions were a mixture of relief and worry and anxiety and some other emotions he couldn't quite make out in his hurried survey. It occurred to him that his disappearance might have hurt or scared them more than he had intended it to and he felt a little bad about it, but this wasn't the time to worry about it. He could apologize later.

He continued to search the sea of faces until he found Lyon. Ignoring the others, he stepped towards Lyon and approached the older mage cautiously. He still didn't know how to reconcile the hateful Lyon of Gray's childhood to the Lyon here now, and he was apprehensive. Maybe there was something he had missed. Maybe Lyon didn't really like him—like Gray?—as much as he had thought. Had he been wrong in judging Lyon to be his—Gray's—friend?

He half-circled Lyon, moving slowly as he studied the older mage with slightly narrowed eyes. Lyon seemed to pick up on the change in his attitude, perhaps could read the wariness and uncertainty in his eyes, and began looking more anxious and unhappy by the second. He didn't necessarily want to make Lyon uncomfortable, but he needed to know.

"Gray?" Lyon asked cautiously.

He shook his head firmly, but Lyon persisted.

"Gray, what's wrong?"

He shook his head again and ignored Lyon for the moment, trying to look past the older mage's fear and all the questions he couldn't answer.

He used the memory fragments he had picked up in Brago and Ur's house as a crutch—a bridge—to evoke more memories now that he was standing in front of Lyon. He teased them out of his shattered mind carefully and sifted through them, looking for some way to make them all fit together. He tried to puzzle out the new memory snippets that were flashing through his mind as he studied Lyon's face, tried to figure out how they connected to the Lyon he had slowly been getting to know these past few months, but he just didn't get it.

Lyon had done cruel things, but also kind ones. He had both good and bad memories of the other man, and the discrepancy between them was so great that he had a hard time reconciling it. He had actually grown to rather like Lyon over these past months, despite their rough start and the occasional jolts of discomfort that still cropped up from time to time.

But Gray…What had Gray thought of Lyon? He tried to puzzle it out, cocking his head to the side and frowning slightly as he studied Lyon's increasingly agitated countenance. Gray had sometimes been angry or annoyed with Lyon, but underneath it all there was something else. Something like—

He blinked in surprise and rocked back on his heels to look at Lyon with new eyes. He suddenly realized that all his confusion and frenzied attempts to reconcile the different sides of Lyon were irrelevant. It didn't matter what Lyon had done in the past. Gray had forgiven Lyon, and Lyon had also forgiven Gray.

And even more than that, to Gray, Lyon was something like…something like…something like a brother, he decided. He turned the word over in his mind and it felt right. And 'brother' meant 'family'. And if Lyon had been family to Gray, then surely Ur must have been too, because they were grouped.

He considered that. The thought hadn't really occurred to him because he had already concluded that Gray's parents had been Gray's family, and that had been that. But Lyon and Ur felt like family too. They felt like a different kind of family, but a family nonetheless. He sucked in a breath as the pieces finally clicked into place. Gray's parents had been Gray's first family, and after they had died, Ur and Lyon had been Gray's second one. And if both of the first two groups had been Gray's families, then the thing he had been searching for to connect all three groups together…

He backed up slowly toward the entrance of the guild again so that he could really take in the scene.

"Gray?" Lyon asked again, swallowing hard and studying him with hurt, anxious eyes.

He glanced back at Lyon and smiled. It faded after only a moment because he still had things to figure out and couldn't take the time to explain everything now, but it was genuine enough and he hoped that it might help assuage Lyon's concerns a little.

Then his attention drifted away from Lyon and his eyes jumped from face to face, studying each guild member in turn. Even those people who weren't part of the guild had some connection here, but he was mostly interested in Fairy Tail because it was the third group. Because even if Gray had felt something for the rest of these people too, there had been something deeper and more meaningful tying Gray to his guild.

He took in all their worried, anxious, puzzled expressions and let all the memories wash over him. Gray had had a lot of good times with these people. Sometimes bad, but mostly good. The pieces he was picking up were a little random and disjointed, but they were enough. As he considered the newest memory fragments and let his eyes drift from person to person, he realized that his assumption had been right. These people were more than just Gray's friends—they had been Gray's family too.

Something clicked into place and he let out his breath in a soft sigh. Yes, all three groups had been family. And he felt like he was  _so close_ to fitting everything back together, but he wasn't quite there.

In the beginning he had had difficulty making even the simplest of connections. Over time, he had finally managed to fit some of the random emotions and memories and characteristics into individual people. Then he had been able to organize some of those people into groups. Now he had figured out that each of those groups represented a family, but although he now knew how they were related, he also needed to figure out what the overarching quality was that held them together. There were three families, but something bigger connected them and held everything together in a unified whole. There had to be something else.

Something in the back of his mind—Gray?—whispered 'home', and he considered that. He hadn't really been able to understand the concept of family before because he hadn't been able to fit the people together, and perhaps he hadn't been able to understand the concept of home because he couldn't understand family. He hadn't quite been able to feel like any of these people were family because he hadn't been able to understand them. He hadn't been able to feel like he was home because he thought that home was a place where you were supposed to belong, and he was just a visitor in the body of the person who belonged here.

He still belonged to the void. He might not call it home, but that was the closest thing he had to a place where he belonged, even if maybe he'd prefer it if he could somehow belong here instead. But Gray must have had a different home, because Gray didn't belong to the void the same way that he did. He had a hard time understanding what home really meant, but if it was what connected these groups together, then surely it must have something to do with the three different families.

He had traveled to the places where Gray's families had been. Were those places 'home'? Did Gray have three homes, then—one for each of the places Gray had lived and laughed and loved? But that didn't seem quite right either. Gray had lived in the apartment he stayed at now, and he had never felt any connection to it even remotely close to what he supposed 'home' might feel like. And although the places he had traveled to had stirred up memories and helped him puzzle out Gray's families, they hadn't felt like anything so special as 'home' either. The places themselves didn't quite give him that sense of belonging that he'd almost felt when he'd remembered Gray's families.

He had the feeling that he was looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it wasn't so much about the places as it was…

About the people, he realized, his eyes widening as he scanned the room. Gray's home hadn't been the city of the ice mage's birth, hadn't been Ur's mountain cabin, hadn't been the apartment, hadn't even been the guild hall. No, Gray's home had been the  _people_. Gray's home had been the family—the families—that Gray had come back to at the end of the day. Gray hadn't so much been in love with the places of the past, but rather the people that he had come to consider as family. It wasn't about the places Gray belonged in, but the people he belonged with. There were three families but only one real home, because Gray had felt like he belonged with all of them and hadn't needed to make the distinction between them anymore.

He was teetering right on the edge of an epiphany now. As he looked around at the people surrounding him, he could almost feel love—Gray's love—for them. He could almost— _almost_ —feel like he was home.

Home is where the heart is.

He wasn't sure if that was something he had overheard over these past few months or if it was something that Gray had known or believed. He didn't know for sure, but it felt right. He had gone on this journey to find Gray. He had gone to the places that had been important to Gray, but he realized now that it wasn't the places that he had needed to see. The places had jogged his memory—Gray's memory—but it was the people and the families that he had needed in order to connect the pieces together.

Because home was where the heart was, and he had traveled around to the places where Gray's families and home had once resided. And in the process, he had been collecting the pieces of Gray's heart. Some piece of Gray's heart had belonged to each of those families, and he had managed to pick up those pieces—remember those pieces—even if he hadn't realized that that had been what he was doing.

He felt like he was holding the pieces of Gray's heart in his hands now, if only he could figure out how to connect them into what had once been Gray. If he could just fit those pieces together, maybe he could find Gray, could figure out what it was that had happened to Gray. If he could just fit those pieces into one real home, one real understanding of where Gray had belonged. One real understanding of where he belonged.

He froze, his mind abruptly coming to a halt for a split second. Wait, where  _he_  belonged? This wasn't about him. This was about Gray. Because he and Gray—

His eyes widened as the realization finally hit him.

"I've been going about this all wrong," he breathed.

There was a brief pause as everyone stared at him uncertainly, unsure of how to respond.

"Are you okay?" Natsu questioned cautiously, his eyes flaring with concern. "Gray?"

He let his gaze drift back to Natsu. "Yes," he said slowly. "Gray. Oh, I've been such a fool." He laughed breathlessly and met Natsu's eyes. "You've been right this whole time, haven't you? I've been Gray all along."

He had never felt like Gray. The others had called him Gray, had told him about the life he had lived before as Gray, but he had only half believed them, half understood them. As far as he had been concerned, he was as close to nothing as you could get. The void had stripped away all sense of himself until there was nothing left of him, until he wasn't sure if there had really been anything of him in the first place. Gray had been as good as a stranger to him, someone who may have existed once but was now dead and gone.

But really, Gray hadn't simply disappeared and died, had he? Oh, it wasn't nearly that simple.

It was like that whole fiasco with Lyon. Lyon had had different sides, had changed over the years, but had always been the same person. And he hadn't needed to find a picture perfect way to line up all those rough edges and inconsistencies, because it had been unnecessary when Lyon had been the same person the whole time, when he had accepted Lyon for all of those sides and acknowledged them all as valid. He hadn't needed to take two different sides of Lyon and mash them together. He hadn't needed to see Lyon as two entirely different people just because the older mage had changed.

But that was what he had been trying to do with himself, wasn't it? He hadn't felt like Gray, so he had tried to figure out how he and Gray connected, had tried smashing them together to figure out how he could make them into the same person, but they had always been the same all along. And it was even worse when he had thought that maybe only one of them could exist at a time. How silly was that?

He had gone on this journey to find Gray, but he thought that maybe he had found himself instead. Or, more accurately, he had done both, because he and Gray were one and the same, weren't they?

No wonder he hadn't been able to find a person in a handful of half-remembered things. Everything he had needed to know had been inside him all along, but he hadn't known how to find it. He had been searching for a stranger when he should have been searching for himself. It wasn't so much that he needed to search for scraps of memory and try to force them together in a puzzle, but that he needed to look within himself and open his mind to what was already there and had been there all along. He had created a puzzle where none need have existed.

The curse couldn't destroy his memories. It hadn't been able to make him disappear like it was supposed to, and it couldn't make his memories disappear either. He had been brought back from the void because the void was not as permanent as the curse wanted it to be. So then his memories must somehow still be accessible too, because the curse just wasn't powerful enough to destroy him completely. He had been searching for memories in places and other people and in a paper notebook, but they must have been here all along.

And Gray…He didn't need to find Gray. Gray had been here the whole time, but he was too blind to have seen it. Every time he had thought Gray was telling him something or showing him a memory or calling him to do something…That had all been him. He had been making his own choices and recalling his own past this whole time, even if he had been attributing them to someone else.

And then Gray was laughing—because how could he have been so stupid?—and  _he_ was crying—because  _how could he have been so stupid?_ —but the truth was that Gray was both laughing and crying, because he had been the only person here the whole time. He probably looked like a crazy person to the others, but he was too relieved and happy and overemotional to care.

Everything was finally coming together, and it wasn't quite the same as it had been before. It was less that things were coming into alignment and clicking into place, and more like he was slipping back into Gray's mind as easily as a second skin, deftly snaring it away from the suddenly helpless curse and settling back into the person he had been and linking it with the person he was now to make one whole self. It wasn't as jarring and confusing and overwhelming as before. No, it felt  _right_. It wasn't perfect, he could still feel the rough edges where the person he had been and the person he had become didn't quite meet up, but it felt right.

But although it was a gentler experience this time, there was still a brief moment where the return to his senses hit him so hard that he stumbled a few paces to the side and slammed into the wall. He briefly closed his eyes and rested against the wall, trying to calm the storm of emotions inside him, because it was that overwhelming mix of sudden emotion that was what had hit him so hard this time, not the memories. The relief that he'd figured it out, the joy that he could finally let go of everything that had been bothering him and feel like he really belonged here, the triumph that he had ultimately beat out the curse and won the war.

But mostly it was the love that got to him, because  _God_ , he loved these people standing around him. He loved them so much that it hurt, but it hurt in a good way and he held on to that feeling as tightly as he could because he never ever wanted to lose it again.

"Gray! Gray! Are you alright?"

He opened his eyes and pushed away from the wall, turning to look back at the others. He smiled at Natsu through his tears.

"Guess what, flame brain?" Gray asked, his voice wavering slightly. "I finally found it."

He had found Gray and Gray had found himself, and everything felt so  _right_ , and it was here to stay this time. Gray was here to stay.

Natsu could obviously sense the change. Perhaps it had been Gray's words or something in his voice. Probably he could see it in Gray's eyes.

Whatever the case, the dragon slayer stayed motionless for a moment—the whole guild did, really, because it was such a stunning and unbelievable revelation that no one dared move in case it evaporated like a dream that had been too good to be true—but then slowly approached the ice mage. Gray watched his friend walk towards him and could read the swirling emotions in his eyes, and he remained still and waited for Natsu to do whatever it was that he planned to do.

Natsu was fumbling with something around his neck. At first Gray thought that he was playing with his scarf—he had a habit of doing that in emotional situations, after all—but it quickly became apparent that the dragon slayer's fingers were working at something beneath the scarf. Natsu paused directly in front of Gray, keeping his eyes locked on the ice mage's face as if afraid that Gray would vanish again if he looked away. He finally managed to unclasp the object he had been fumbling around with, and Gray watched as Natsu pulled out the necklace.

The dragon slayer reached out and grasped one of Gray's hands, turning it so that the palm was facing up. He deposited the silver chain in it with trembling fingers.

"Welcome back, ice block," Natsu whispered, his voice breaking slightly as he finally began to cry, the tears dripping silently down his face.

Gray stared at him for a moment, his heart twisting painfully at the sight of his friend's tears, but then looked down at the necklace coiled in his hand.

_'If it's important to you…'_

Gray let the chain slide through his fingers and fall to the floor. It hit the ground with a faint clinking sound and lay there abandoned. It was important, but Gray could always pick it up later.

There were more important things.

Instead, he opted to launch himself at Natsu with enough force to send the two mages stumbling backwards a few paces, and wrapped his friend in a tight hug. And then they were both laughing and crying as they clung to each other so tightly that it hurt to breathe. That seemed to break everyone else out of their trance, and suddenly everyone was crowding around, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Lyon was suddenly by his side, eyes filled with tears, and Gray unhooked one arm from Natsu so that he could hug his brother too. And with everyone gathered around him, smiling and laughing and crying, Gray had never before felt so loved, had never before felt so much like he belonged, as he did now.

Gray had finally come home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess it might kind of feel a little anticlimactic? That's what I was worried about, anyway. But I feel like it kind of had to be that way because this whole final revelation was a really internal, personal thing, and ultimately I like it, anticlimactic or not. And it was a pain in the neck to figure out what Gray's thought process might be and how he might figure things out, let me tell you. It would have been so much easier to just pull an "Eileen" and introduce a random character who could magically fix everything for no apparent reason. But I wouldn't have been satisfied with such an easy cop-out and I feel like this needed to happen, for better or for worse.
> 
> So, this is technically the last chapter-chapter, but there's still the epilogue and the two little after-story one-shots for extra closure. I mean, I wanted to end the chapter here, but I feel like this is not necessarily an ideal place to end a story - it's kind of a little abrupt, maybe? - so hopefully the extra pieces will give that little bit of closure the verse still needs.


	27. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here I present you with: An Interesting Stylistic Choice that No One Wanted. In other words, the parentheses are back XD I thought it would be a neat little trick to help tie the epilogue into the prologue, although they ended up working a little...differently. But the basic idea was that I wanted to have some things linking the beginning and the end, so you might notice that there are a lot of parallels between the prologue and epilogue, as well as to some other stuff as well. Because.
> 
> Uh, sorry that the sentences in parentheses are broken up, but they're like that for a reason. Each piece is related to the part below it, although some of them are more obvious than others. I'll go ahead and reproduce all the sentence fragments at the end of the chapter, if you want to see them all together.

* * *

**Epilogue**

_(In which Natsu needs some reassurances.)_

* * *

_(Because You Told Me to Go…)_

_._

Natsu should really be in the guild hall with everyone else right now, since there was still a lot of planning to do before they went off on their newest mission. After all these months, they had finally gotten a tip about Makarov's location from a reputable source, so they would be heading off to the Alvarez Empire soon to find out what the hell it was doing with Jii-chan. And hopefully the master would also be able to explain why he had ordered Fairy Tail to disband in the first place, because neither Natsu nor anyone else had managed to figure that out yet. He had just told them to all go their separate ways—would have told Natsu to as well, if the dragon slayer hadn't already left—and Natsu didn't understand why. Although at this point he was less concerned with the explanation and more impatient to get Jii-chan back. It had been a while since he had seen the old man.

Now that Gray was finally back, it was time to find and bring back the other missing member of their little family.

Natsu wasn't really one for planning, but he had at least attempted to participate in the debate over how to best go about this mission. Although he perhaps hadn't been very helpful since his idea of a plan was to just run straight into the action with as little forethought as possible. Erza was not impressed by this idea, so the discussion had continued and had dragged on for a couple days now. Natsu was impatient to just go straight to Alvarez, pound whoever needed pounding, and fetch Jii-chan, but it wasn't his impatience that had made him leave the hall today.

_._

_(…I left.)_

_._

He didn't know why it had hit him so hard today in particular, but he had just felt the sudden urge to get out of there. So he had quietly slipped out of the hall without attracting anyone else's attention, figuring that it wasn't like they'd miss his fabulous contributions to their planning session anyway. It was a pretty impressive feat considering how terrible he usually was at being sneaky, but he had really wanted to be alone right now so he had managed it somehow.

He didn't know why he felt compelled to come here after everything that had happened, but here he was.

It was silly, it was stupid, but he had come back anyway. There was no reason to. Gray had his memories and he was back for good this time. At first Natsu had been afraid that maybe Gray would just slip away again, that this was just another temporary reprieve, but he had quickly been able to see in Gray's eyes that his friend was here to stay. It had been a relief to be sure. At first there had been a lot of crying and then a lot of celebration, and no one had wanted to leave Gray's side for days.

It had been a few weeks since that glorious day, and they were still figuring out how exactly they needed to adjust to these new circumstances. They were still figuring out what was the same and what was different and whether or not there was still anything to worry about.

Oddly enough, it seemed to be the rest of them who were having a harder time adjusting to the abrupt change, even though Natsu thought that maybe it should be Gray who really needed to sort things out. Lyon was still hanging around and would likely stay until Fairy Tail went off on its rescue mission. Natsu wasn't terribly surprised by this—it wasn't like he had expected the older mage to go running back to Lamia Scale the moment Gray recovered. Still, part of Lyon's reluctance to leave undoubtedly stemmed from a difficulty adjusting to the sudden shift, a difficulty figuring out where to go from here now that Gray didn't need him quite the same way anymore, and he wasn't the only one. There were things in everyone else's behavior that were carryovers from Gray's time as an amnesiac as well.

At times someone would be telling a story and then abruptly fall silent and give Gray a worried look when they mentioned something about his past, before realizing that it wouldn't make him so uncomfortable anymore. Gray would just smile reassuringly or pretend that he hadn't noticed their slip. One morning Erza had walked into the guild and immediately asked Gray if he was ready to go on their walk, before flushing as she remembered that was no longer necessary. Gray had just smiled crookedly and said that he would be delighted, sweeping an embarrassed Erza back out to take a morning stroll. A couple times Natsu and Happy had walked Gray back to his apartment in the evening or gone to pick him up in the morning. Gray took it all in stride, not commenting on the out of character behavior from his rival. Lyon and Natsu were still often a little overprotective as well, before remembering that Gray could take care of himself again. Gray would sometimes chide them gently, but mostly he just smiled and made a joke to lighten the atmosphere.

It would take a while for everyone to settle back into a pattern of behavior more reminiscent of how they had acted before the mess with the void. Natsu got the feeling that Gray was being very patient with them, and he suspected that part of it might be that the ice mage felt bad about the ordeal he had put them through, even though it wasn't his fault. Even more than that though, Natsu knew that Gray understood them and why they treated him the way they did, and that made him more compassionate.

In many ways, Gray was much like he had been before everything had happened with the void. In fact, he had gone back to being so normal so quickly that Natsu sometimes wondered if he was hiding things. His personality was mostly normal, teasing and sarcasm included, although Natsu noticed that Gray was perhaps a little gentler than usual. His teasing was fonder and he didn't always follow up with a verbal jab if it would make someone uncomfortable about something that had happened while he was an amnesiac, even when it was Natsu or Lyon he was messing around with. Perhaps  _especially_  if it was Natsu or Lyon.

All the same, Gray was maybe a little quieter, a little more thoughtful and distracted at times. Luckily none of his memories had faded again, at least. Out of curiosity, Natsu had asked him how well he could remember his time as an amnesiac. Gray had said that some of it was a little hazy, the first few weeks in particular, because his thoughts had been so unorganized and alien that they were hard to understand. But he did remember most all of it to some extent and had near-perfect recall of the past few months, even though he didn't seem to much like talking about those times.

Natsu also asked about the curse, because Gray once said that he could still feel it lurking in the back of his mind. Gray's memories were back so everything should be okay, but Natsu had wanted to be sure. Natsu could tell that something wasn't quite right because Gray's mouth had immediately twisted in a way that showed a reluctance to speak, but the ice mage had grudgingly admitted that every once in a while he could still feel a hint of the curse for a moment. Gray had hurried to say that it was barely there at all and was fading away more and more as time passed. Natsu believed him, to an extent, but something in Gray's eyes warned the dragon slayer that it wasn't so simple.

On the bright side, Bickslow had said that Gray's soul was in much better shape than it had been, although he had also admitted that it wasn't the same as it had been before the void. Natsu had asked if it would ever heal completely, and Bickslow had just pursed his lips and half-shrugged as he shook his head slightly. Natsu was perhaps a little disappointed, but it only confirmed what he had already known: Gray would never be quite the same.

_._

_(I only left because I expected you to still be here when I came back…)_

_._

"I thought I might find you here."

Natsu was jerked out of his musings abruptly and half-turned to look over at where Gray was walking up to him. The ice mage was smiling faintly, but it was a sad smile because he obviously had a good idea of why Natsu was here.

"Gray?" Natsu asked reflexively. "What…? I didn't know that you knew about this place."

Gray nodded slightly and shoved his hands into his pockets as he stopped by Natsu's side. "Yeah," he said quietly. "Erza showed me most of the city, but I started getting curious when I began getting memory flashes, so I started poking around and exploring more on my own. I guess I realized that the river was an important place that had linked me to a few people, you and Erza most notably. Maybe I thought it would jog my memory."

He shrugged slightly. Natsu stayed quiet and watched him with bated breath, willing him to go on. If amnesic Gray hadn't liked to hear talk of his past, Gray now didn't much like talking about his time without his memory. Well, he didn't seem to mind talking about some of the events or conversations that had taken place during that time, but he rarely offered any explanation of what he had been thinking or feeling. Natsu hoped that maybe Gray would eventually open up more, but for now he didn't press for too many details because he suspected that Gray was still coming to terms with some of the things that had happened to him over the past several months. Hopefully Gray would be more willing to talk when he sorted things out.

"So I was walking up and down the river one day," Gray continued on, his eyes a little unfocused as he considered the memory in question. "It was after you moved out of my apartment, so I could run around in the evenings without you hounding me. At one point I was poking around in the bushes and trees along the side of the river, and I just happened to run across this." He smiled faintly. "Threw me for a loop at first."

Natsu shifted a little awkwardly and tugged at his scarf to loosen it a bit since it was getting hot and uncomfortable. "Yeah…I wanted to put it somewhere that had been important to us," he murmured. "And the river seemed like a good place, given all the fights and things we had here." He laughed a little, although he was only half amused. "Sounds silly when I put it like that, I guess, but I always really enjoyed our fights and we had a lot of good times here, so…Well, I made sure to hide it in an especially thick tangle of trees and shrubs so that no one would randomly stumble on it."

"You mean so that Fairy Tail wouldn't find it?" Gray asked shrewdly, a knowing look gleaming in his dark eyes.

Natsu sighed and glanced away. "Yeah," he replied. Then he smiled a little ruefully. "Although I guess I didn't hide it well enough if you managed to stumble on it anyway."

"Hm."

The two friends stared at the object in front of them in silence for a few long moments.

_._

_(…but you weren't.)_

_._

The gravestone wasn't really anything special to look at. It was made of a nondescript gray stone—Natsu had initially toyed with the idea of using white as a tribute to Gray's ice, but had eventually decided to go with gray so that he couldn't describe it without using Gray's name—and lacked any kind of adornment except for the word 'Gray' scrawled across its surface.

"What?" Gray asked finally. "The grave Fairy Tail set up for me wasn't good enough?"

He was half teasing, trying to drag Natsu out of his melancholy mood, but his eyes were still tired and sad despite the half-smile.

Natsu looked away and scuffed his foot on the ground. "I made one for Lisanna too, after she 'died'. Why did you think that I wouldn't make one for you too?"

Gray didn't say anything for a long moment and when he finally replied, he didn't really answer the question at all. Which was probably just as well. Natsu wasn't sure that there was really anything to say to that.

"Funny," Gray mused instead. "It seems like every time you make a tombstone for someone who 'died', it turns out that they're not really dead after all."

Natsu bit his lip to keep from responding that Gray very nearly  _had_ died, or disappeared or whatever. Bickslow's opinion was that if that they had waited even a few more months to pull Gray out of the void, the ice mage would have probably disappeared entirely. Natsu didn't really want to think about that.

"Maybe raising the dead is my secret ability or something," he replied, although he was still too out of sorts to really sound convincingly upbeat. "I should go into the magical gravestone business."

Gray shot him a look, obviously aware that Natsu was still in a mood. "You might need some more practice first, seeing the state of this one," the ice mage teased, trying to get the dragon slayer to lighten up. "Most people would expect some kind of inscription, or at the very least, their last name."

He smiled to show that he was teasing rather than offended, but Natsu just pursed his lips and looked away again. He appreciated Gray's attempts to get him back to his normal self, but Natsu didn't feel like joking about this.

"I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should write," Natsu said finally, his voice quiet. "I mean, it had to be perfect, you know? It had to say everything you meant to me, everything that I hadn't gotten to say to you, in only a few words. And I've never been that good with words to start with."

"Natsu—" Gray started, his voice regretful and sad.

"I started getting frustrated, to be honest, because nothing I came up with sounded quite right," Natsu continued, ignoring his friend. "It wasn't  _enough_. I figured that I might as well start with your name since that had to be on there anyway, but as you can see, I stopped right after 'Gray'. Because I was just looking at it trying to figure out what I could possibly say, and then it hit me.

"I mean, it was an impossible task from the start, wasn't it? Because a handful of words would never be enough, no matter how pretty I made them. And I was looking at your name right there and it occurred to me that I couldn't really say anything better than that, could I? What could I possibly say that would be more meaningful? What could I say that would be more important? What could I say that would hold more meaning for me, be more important to me, than  _you_?"

Natsu swallowed hard and stared at the chiseled letters on the stone's surface. "So in the end I just left it like that, with just your name, because that was all I needed. To me, it was better than all the fancy words in the world."

He fell silent and continued to stare at the gravestone moodily. He didn't look over at Gray, and the ice mage stayed quiet for several long moments as well, before clearing his throat quietly.

"Not good with words, huh?" Gray murmured finally with a soft, breathy laugh. Natsu glanced over at him and saw his dark eyes shimmering with unshed tears for a second before he tilted his head to let his hair fall in his face and hide his expression. "Thank you, Natsu," he said quietly.

Natsu sighed. "In the end, it still wasn't enough," he muttered, his guilt and grief and pain flaring up again even though Gray was standing right next to him.

_._

_(I came up with impossible plans and fought impossible odds to get you back…)_

_._

"No, a rock in the ground is never enough, no matter how fancy or simple it is, no matter how elegant or meaningful the words are," Gray agreed after a moment. "But Natsu…Isn't it enough now? Isn't it enough that you came up with a ridiculous scheme that never should have worked and managed to get me back anyway? That you spent months fighting to fix things?

"I know that what happened was terrible and that you were upset over it and that you didn't feel like you could do anything good enough to make up for it, but that's only half the story. You did everything you could to get me back in one piece, and I still can't quite believe that you managed it, but you did. Is that not enough to make up for whatever guilt you feel about leaving in the first place?

"Why are you still standing in front of a rock that you've already admitted was never enough? I'm right here, Natsu. Am I not enough?"

Natsu's eyes filled with tears that he hurriedly tried to blink away. He understood what Gray was saying, understood that he needed to hear it, but he wasn't quite sure if he was ready to just move on yet. Which was a little silly considering he'd always been pretty good at putting the past behind him and looking to the future. For some reason it was harder to let go and readjust this time, after so much had happened. Things had been wrong for so long that it was still hard to believe that they were right again.

He already knew that there was no point in him being here now. Gray was back, so Natsu had no reason to be moping around a grave for someone who wasn't even dead. The dragon slayer had used to come here sometimes, back when he thought that Gray was dead, but it had made sense then. He had pretty much stopped coming entirely after Gray had returned from the void, partially because he had been too busy taking care of Gray and partially because he hadn't seen any need to come back when his friend clearly wasn't dead after all. Which raised the question of why he had felt such a strong desire to come here now, because he knew that Gray was right.

"Of course you are," Natsu whispered.

Gray sighed. "It's not that I don't understand," the ice mage said, his voice subdued. "Because I do. But I'm not dead and you're only hurting yourself by dwelling on the past. You need to let this go, Natsu."

Then Gray arched an eyebrow and gave Natsu a mischievous look that was at odds with his earlier somberness. "You know, as much as I appreciate the sentiment behind this lovely tombstone, it's weird to have it here when I'm not dead, and I kind of want to dump it in the river," he said, his voice teasing but laced with meaningfulness.

Natsu nodded slowly, understanding Gray's point. This tombstone was nothing but bad memories and it was a link to the days when everyone had thought that Gray was dead. It was a touching memorial in its own way, but it was also a reminder of how bad things had gotten. And if it hadn't been enough then, it certainly wasn't enough now.

Natsu didn't know if it actually bothered Gray to have a gravestone lying around for him, but he suspected that the ice mage had proposed the idea as a way to help Natsu let go. The dragon slayer had come here to dwell on the past and mourn despite the fact that there was nothing left to mourn over, and Gray wanted him to let it go and move on. It wasn't easy to just let go of months of heartache, but Natsu would manage it eventually. Getting rid of the tombstone wouldn't magically make everything better, but it was a symbolic first step.

"Alright," Natsu decided, nodding his head firmly. "Let's do it."

Gray smiled faintly and moved over to one side of the stone slab. Natsu adjusted his scarf, loosening it again because it really  _was_ hot today, and then moved to the other side. The two mages each grasped their side of the stone and heaved it upward, and Gray grunted in surprise.

"Damn, this is heavy," the ice mage groaned. "How the hell did you get this all the way down here by yourself?"

Natsu winced slightly as the heavy stone tugged at his muscles painfully, and the two friends began staggering slowly towards the river.

"Took a long time," Natsu grunted. "And wasn't a whole lot of fun."

He cursed under his breath as he stumbled over some undergrowth and almost toppled over. Luckily, he managed to keep his hold on the stone and the two mages kept moving. They didn't say much, too focused on not dropping their burden, but slowly worked their way out of the copse of trees and down to the riverbank.

They paused for a moment at the river's edge and met each other's eyes over the top of the slab. Gray nodded, and the two mages swung the stone slightly and leaned forward to toss it into the water. The weight of the stone and then its sudden disappearance served to throw Natsu off balance, and for a moment his arms windmilled in the air as he teetered on the edge of the river. Gray hurriedly grabbed his arm and dragged him back a step to prevent him from toppling into the water.

Natsu opened his mouth to thank his friend, but it was at that moment that a sudden gust of wind blew past them. The dragon slayer had already loosened his scarf because of the heat, and that combined with his sudden movements and the wind put his most precious possession in a precarious position. Natsu's attention was promptly directed away from Gray as the wind snatched up his scarf and carried it out over the river. The dragon scales were heavy and the scarf was already starting to drop towards the water.

Natsu cursed. He had just been saved from taking an unplanned bath but it looked like he'd be getting wet anyway, because his scarf was just out of his reach and there was no way he was going to let it get swallowed up by the river. He reached out a hand, but the scarf was just beyond his grasp. He was going to have to jump for it.

_._

_(…because you told me once that if something is important to me, I shouldn't lose it.)_

_._

Gray hurriedly yanked him back, startling Natsu with his suddenness, and then reached out himself. He was closer to the spot where Natsu's scarf was drifting downward towards the water, and by leaning out dangerously far, he could snag it with the very tips of his fingers. This time it was Gray's turn to teeter on the edge, overbalanced by how far he was leaning out over the water. Natsu quickly grabbed his wrist and pulled him back.

Gray turned back to the dragon slayer and arched an eyebrow as he handed Natsu the troublesome scarf. "What is it with you and losing this thing?" the ice mage asked dryly, shaking his head a little as Natsu hastily grabbed the scarf in question.

The dragon slayer hesitated for a moment, staring at the precious gift he held in his hands, and then looked back up at Gray.

"Funny," he said quietly, "but every time I lose this, you always seem to bring it back for me."

Gray gave him an odd look. "Of course," the ice mage said dismissively, his tone making it clear that he thought Natsu was making a big deal out of something painfully obvious. "It's important to you, isn't it? It's not like I can just ignore it when I see you losing it."

Natsu shook his head slowly. He understood why Gray always returned the scarf when he found it, but that wasn't what Natsu had meant.

"No, I mean…It always seems to be you," Natsu explained, trying to figure out how to convey his thoughts. "You're almost always the one to bring it back. And even more than that, it's like you…Well, you're always the one who reminds me of what's important when I lose sight of it."

Gray stared at him in silence for a moment and then let out a breath. "Yeah, you've always done the same for me, especially over these past few months," the ice mage agreed. "But it's not only me, Natsu.  _All_ of your friends help remind you of what's important. You don't have to count on me to do it for you. We all remind you of the important things, just like you help us remember them when we forget. You're so focused on me that you've been paying too much attention to the things I've done for you and not enough to all the things everyone else has done. When someone loses something important to them,  _all_  of Fairy Tail will fight to help them get it back. That's how family works."

Natsu considered that quietly as he wrapped his scarf back around his neck snugly, making sure that it was tight enough to stay exactly where it belonged this time. He knew that Gray was right, of course. Maybe it had been losing Gray that had caused him to forget about how much everyone else helped him too, because for a long time, all he had been able to see was the hole Gray's absence had left in his life. But it was true that everyone had really helped him out a lot. They always had, but especially after he'd come back and found Gray 'dead'. He'd always known that, but it had been too easy to overlook at the time, when he was distracted by his own grief and guilt. He really owed them a lot. As much, he supposed, as they owed him.

_._

_(And now, after all these months, we're together again, you and I…)_

_._

The two friends stood side by side in companionable silence for a couple minutes, watching the water flowing by in the river. It was a little too murky to make out the gravestone in its depths, but clear enough that Natsu could at least see the rough outline and shadow of the stone. He was suddenly glad that it was gone. It felt a little like a weight had been lifted off his chest, because it suddenly made it seem all the more real that Gray wasn't dead, wasn't an amnesiac, but was right here next to him.

"I'm glad you're back," Natsu said absently after a moment. "I missed you a lot."

He glanced over at Gray as he sensed his friend shifting. The ice mage had turned a little to look at Natsu again instead of at the river.

"I know," Gray replied with a soft sigh. He smiled a little wistfully. "I would have missed you a lot too, if I could have."

Natsu winced automatically, not liking the reminder of what Gray's mental state had been like. Gray noticed the dragon slayer's involuntary reaction and grimaced faintly, an apologetic look shining in his eyes.

"Sorry," the ice mage said, his sigh heavier this time. "There was nothing I could have done while I was in the void or when I didn't understand anything afterward. Towards the end I still didn't really remember you all, but I wanted to. So I actually kind of missed you in a way, just not the same way you—"

He broke off suddenly. For a moment his eyes glazed over and he stared blankly at Natsu without seeing him. His head cocked slightly to the side as if he was listening to something that Natsu couldn't hear. Then Gray winced and shook his head slightly as he forced his eyes to focus on the dragon slayer again.

This was something else that had changed. Gray did it occasionally, and although it only ever lasted a few seconds before he pulled himself back again, it still scared Natsu. The dragon slayer hadn't pressed too hard for answers because he was definitely afraid of what he might hear, but he couldn't quite shake the feeling that he recognized the gesture. Because although Gray had always laughed it off as nothing and had never come out and said exactly what it was, Natsu thought that he knew.

_._

_(…but there's still some part of me that's terrified that I'll wake up one day and you'll be gone.)_

_._

"It's the curse, isn't it?" Natsu asked, his voice wavering as he finally forced himself to address the issue that had been haunting him. Gray's face immediately closed off and he seemed reluctant to speak. "Please, Gray, just tell me. I just need to know."

Gray let out a breath and looked away. "Yeah," he said finally, after several long beats of silence. "Usually I'm not even aware that it's there, but every once in a while it will make its presence known. It's really not that bad, Natsu. It's too weak to do anything now."

Natsu grimaced. He didn't really want to hear that, didn't want to hear that the curse was still lurking around. It made him even more nervous that he might lose Gray again.

"Is it trying to take your memories again?" he asked, although he was afraid of the answer.

Gray smirked, a hint of vicious satisfaction sparking in his eyes for a moment. "Oh, it can try, but it's got nothing to sink its ugly little teeth into anymore. It's too weak and I understand my memories too well for it to get a good grip on them now. Don't worry about it, flame brain. It's not going to be screwing around with my memories again."

"Then what  _is_ it doing?" Natsu pressed, sensing that there was still something Gray wasn't telling him.

Gray's satisfaction bled away and he looked uncomfortable and unwilling to speak again. "It can't do anything," the ice mage said firmly.

That wasn't a real answer.

"Gray. Please."

Gray hesitated for a moment, but then finally sighed in defeat. "It calls me," he said reluctantly. "It calls me to the void."

Natsu's heart shuddered to a stop. " _What?_ " he breathed fearfully.

Gray pursed his lips and looked back out over the river. "I know that you all think that the void was a terrible place, and it is. And you think that the important thing is escaping from it and never looking back, and that's true too. But…" He sighed heavily. "I don't think that you can really understand because you weren't there long enough and you never really experienced it the same way I did.

"I don't think you can understand how enthralling the void can really be. The curse calls me back to nothingness and I know that sounds terrible, but it's also more tempting than you can imagine. Now that I'm back for good I don't need that anymore and I can just brush it off, but before…Well, what did you think that the drifting was?"

Natsu stared at him in horror, but Gray kept his gaze fixed resolutely on the river.

"It can't—It can't actually force you back into the void, can it?" the dragon slayer asked, wringing his trembling hands together.

Gray winced and finally looked back over. "It can't  _force_ me to do anything right now," he assured Natsu. "It forced me back when I first got hit by Memento Mori because it was still strong then and it could do that, but it's been a lot weaker since I've gotten back from the void. That's why it calls me instead. It tries to tempt me instead of force me, because it knows that it's too weak to make me do anything unless I want to. And I'm not really listening to it right now, so it can't do much of anything."

"Back when you were drifting, could it have…?"

Gray grimaced faintly and shrugged. "It was stronger then, so I don't know if it might have been able to do something," he admitted. "And I was still pretty disoriented and felt too much of a connection to the void. But I don't think that it was strong enough to have actually dragged me back into the void even then. And now it's much weaker and it gets weaker every day. I don't think it's ever going to completely die—I think it's probably always going to be part of me, just like the void is now part of me—but you're worrying too much over something that isn't a real problem.

"I have too much tying me here to even consider giving in to the curse and seeking out the void. The only reason I could be content in the void in the first place was because the curse cut all my ties to this world. I'm not vulnerable to the curse anymore and I've got too much to live for now. I'm not going anywhere."

Natsu let out a shuddering breath. He sure hoped so. He could feel that Gray was right, but it didn't change the fact that Natsu still worried terribly sometimes. The dragon slayer logically knew that Gray was safe and wasn't going to just disappear again, but sometimes he'd still get scared or worried for no real reason.

There was even one time, a couple days after Gray had gotten his memories back, that Natsu had been woken up late at night by a nightmare of Gray dying, Gray losing his memories, Gray getting sucked back into the void where they could never find him again. It was amazing that he hadn't woken Happy up as well, with all his thrashing about. But the little cat had still been sound asleep, and although Natsu tried to go back to sleep as well, he was too fidgety and ill at ease. He had needed to see Gray  _right now_  to know that his friend was still here.

So Natsu had run all the way to Gray's apartment in the dark. He had broken in with the spare key and gone to check that Gray was there, because even though he logically knew that nothing was wrong, he still needed to reassure himself. His first instinct was to just bust into Gray's room and make sure that the ice mage was alright, but he had managed to restrain himself since it was late and Gray was undoubtedly sleeping.

Instead he had just pressed his ear up against the door until he could hear Gray's slow, even breathing. He'd calmed down a little after that. Maybe too much, because apparently he'd fallen asleep there again. It had given Gray quite a surprise when he woke up later that night and opened his door to find Natsu there.

That was how Natsu had found out that Gray still had nightmares of the void memory sometimes, since the ice mage hadn't been awake enough to come up with a better excuse for why he'd gotten up at three in the morning. So apparently there were plenty of nightmares to go around for everyone, and Gray had just given Natsu a blanket and told him to at least sleep on the couch if he was going to insist on staying over. Gray had been a surprisingly good sport about it the next morning as well, just telling Natsu to remember to put the spare key back behind the loose brick so that the dragon slayer could find it the next time he felt the need to come back over. Natsu had understood and appreciated the implicit invitation. He hadn't taken Gray up on it yet, but he knew that he would eventually. Although next time he'd try not to do it in the middle of the night, because Happy had freaked out when he woke up in the morning and Natsu was gone.

_._

_(You're important to me and I don't want to lose you again…)_

_._

"You'd better not," Natsu replied finally, his voice soft.

Gray bit his lip, not liking the dragon slayer's persistent melancholia. "Don't you worry," the ice mage said with a laugh, trying to sound more cheerful than he was. "It's not like I could possibly leave now. Who would fetch your scarf for you since you keep losing it?"

For a moment, Natsu couldn't make himself say anything past the lump in his throat.

"Stupid ice block," he whispered finally, his voice wavering slightly. "This isn't about the scarf. This is about  _you_. I don't want to lose  _you_."

Gray's eyes dimmed. "Natsu…"

_._

_(…so let me hold you for a moment, let me reassure myself that you're really still here.)_

_._

Natsu couldn't take it anymore. He turned and lunged for Gray, throwing his arms around him and holding on for dear life, as if the ice mage might slip through his fingers if he didn't hold on tightly enough. Gray made a surprised sound in the back of his throat, but after a second he wrapped his arms around Natsu as well. Natsu buried his face in Gray's shirt and tried to fight back the tears at the corners of his eyes as Gray carded his fingers soothingly through the dragon slayer's hair.

Just for this moment, it didn't matter that they weren't the hugging type, that they'd hate getting caught doing this, that they'd most certainly deny that this ever happened if anyone asked. Gray didn't push Natsu away like he normally might have and Natsu didn't let go like he normally would have.

Natsu still didn't know what had brought on this sudden melancholy, this desperate fear for Gray and worry about what could have happened and what might still happen. It was still silly because Gray was right here, but just for a second, Natsu needed to be able to convince himself that Gray was here and wasn't going to disappear again and was here to stay. Dumping the tombstone in the river hadn't been quite enough, because like they had said, it had never really been enough for anything. But Gray had been right. Yes, it was only Gray that was enough right now, so Natsu clung to him for everything he was worth. The only way to truly accept that things were going to be okay was to look to Gray himself.

"I'm sorry," Natsu whispered.

He wasn't exactly sure what he was apologizing for. Maybe for how Gray had taken Memento Mori to protect him, maybe for how Natsu had turned around and left, maybe for how he still seemed to be unable to let go of everything that had happened even though Gray was finally back, maybe for how he was currently having a meltdown on Gray for no apparent reason, maybe for something else entirely. Perhaps Gray understood that, because he tightened his grip on Natsu and stayed silent.

"I'm sorry," Natsu repeated, his voice quavering, "but please, please, don't ask me to leave again when you know that you aren't okay. Please don't ask me to let go and give up on you again. God, Gray, please don't leave me again."

Gray let out a breath and somehow managed to hug Natsu even tighter. Then he let go and pushed Natsu away gently, holding the dragon slayer out at arm's length. Natsu sniffled and rubbed at his face to get rid of the few stray tears that had escaped. Gray watched him with solemn eyes.

_._

_(Give me a sign that you're here for good and things are going to be okay…)_

_._

"I have something for you," the ice mage said, instead of verbally acknowledging Natsu's words.

The dragon slayer's brow wrinkled in confusion as Gray began rummaging in the pocket of his coat. After a moment, Gray produced a small object and handed it to Natsu, who carefully took it and studied it with no little bewilderment. It appeared to be a small flower made of ice, which seemed like an awfully odd thing to give someone like Natsu.

"A flower?" the dragon slayer asked, puzzled. "What kind of weird thing is—?"

He broke off suddenly and looked at the little ice sculpture more closely. Something about it seemed kind of familiar. It almost looked like…

Natsu's head jerked up and he looked at Gray with wide eyes. "You went to your grave then?"

Because this was a perfect replica of the type of flower that grew on the vines around the grave Fairy Tail had set up for Gray. It looked almost exactly like the flower Natsu had brought home with him all those many months ago, the one he had watched die and then had buried.

The ice mage shrugged and nodded. "I went last week," he confirmed.

"When?" Natsu asked with a frown.

Because everyone had pretty much been glued to Gray's side since his memories had come back, and Natsu couldn't think of a time when Gray had been gone long enough to have traveled all the way down to his grave and back.

"I went late at night and then stayed until very early morning before coming back." Gray shrugged dismissively. "I was back before I normally go to the guild."

Natsu looked back down at the flower. Okay, so that explained how Gray knew what the flower would look like, but what would have possessed him to realize that it had been important to Natsu? Natsu hadn't even really thought about the flower in months since he had been so busy caring for Gray and because he hadn't really needed to mope over it once Gray was back from the void. It's not like he had ever told Gray—or anyone else, really—about the flower because it had seemed silly and it wasn't something that he particularly wanted to share with anyone else. So how would Gray have known?

Unless…Natsu frowned back over at Gray. Several months ago—Natsu thought that it might have actually been the day after Gray had first come back from the void—when Natsu had found Gray's necklace hidden in the kitchen cabinets, Happy had brought up the flower as part of his defense for why he hadn't given the necklace to the dragon slayer. It had never been mentioned since then, so Gray must have…He must have remembered it this whole time, even though he hadn't cared about much of anything in the beginning and hadn't bothered paying attention to most things. He had remembered it because it had been important to Natsu.

Natsu swallowed hard. "This isn't going to melt on me, is it?" he asked, instead of voicing his thoughts.

"Nope, that ice isn't going to melt." Gray hesitated a moment as something seemed to occur to him. "Well, it will melt if I die," he conceded, "but I'm not planning on doing that for a long time." He gave Natsu a meaningful look. "So as long as you can hold on to that, you'll know that I'm okay. Which would be a lot easier than trekking all the way to my apartment and sleeping on the floor every time you start getting worried again. I mean, not that you can't do that too, if you need to. You know that you're always welcome to come over if you need to, as long as you keep your grubby hands off my kitchen cabinets."

His smile widened and took on a teasing edge. Natsu snorted, but his gaze drifted back down to the ice again.

The original flower had been all about death, had symbolized Gray's death and burial since Natsu hadn't been there for them. This flower was a lot more about life, a sign that Gray was alive and alright. Natsu kind of liked that, how it was overwriting something that had been unbearably sad with something comforting and a lot more beautiful. And he did appreciate the gesture. He liked knowing that he could just check to make sure the ice flower was still here in order to reassure himself that Gray was okay. He rather thought that he'd stick it on his windowsill right where he'd kept the other one, so that he could overwrite that part of the memory too.

He knew that this would never be enough in the same way that the tombstone never had been, but it helped. It made him feel a little better, a little calmer, a little less scared. And in the meantime, since this would still never be quite enough, Natsu would stick with Gray anyway, because nothing could replace his friend—not a dying flower or a slab of stone or a pretty little ice sculpture.

He looked back at Gray and smiled a little. "Thank you," he said.

Gray smiled back. "No problem. Now, I think you've been sitting around out here with the past for too long now." His smile faded for a moment. "I'm sorry that I asked you to leave and give up, and I'm sorry that I was giving up too. But that's in the past. You don't have to worry about me so much now. You came back for me, Natsu, and I'll always come back too. So what do you say we leave this place behind and go back to the guild? Let's go home."

Natsu stared at him for a moment, before nodding slowly. "Well, luckily you stopped me from burning down the guild hall last time, so we still have somewhere to go back to," he said, finally allowing himself to fall back into the teasing that Gray had been trying to start this whole time.

Surprisingly, this time it was Gray who sobered at the banter. He stared at Natsu somberly, his dark eyes serious.

"Not the guild hall, Natsu," he said quietly. "The guild hall is just a building. If you burned it down, we could just build another, no harm done. Home isn't about the places—it's about the people. Don't you see? That's why you don't have to worry about me leaving again. I found my way home, and you and Lyon and Fairy Tail are too damn important to me to lose again. We could always build a new guild hall, but we can't ever just replace each other. Home isn't the guild hall. Home is the  _guild_."

Natsu blinked at Gray for a moment as he considered the words and turned them over in his head. They felt  _right_. It was something that Natsu had always known, but it was also something that was easy to forget sometimes if no one reminded you. Luckily, Natsu had Gray and the rest of Fairy Tail to remind him whenever he forgot.

Natsu had come out here because he wanted to be alone, but he suddenly realized that he really  _did_ want to be with his family again. He smiled widely at Gray.

"Alright," he said. "Let's go home."

_._

_(…Because I Need You to Stay.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Congrats to those of you who made it all the way to the end.
> 
> Some of you may recall that I said there would be two sort of after-stories to this. The epilogue gives some closure, especially for Natsu, but it also leaves some things unanswered that I eventually decided to flesh out a little more. I had the basic idea of the epilogue planned out for a while, long before I realized what a key role Lyon would play in the story, so it wasn't really tailored to include him. Since he did play a much more important part than I'd anticipated, I thought he deserved a little extra closure. Also, I think Gray needs more closure. It's kind of hinted here that things aren't quite the same and something might still be eating at him, and I decided to go ahead and write something to address that. So there will be two one-shots that take place after the epilogue, one in Lyon's POV and one in Gray's. I'm going to post those in a separate story called "Because I Never Told You" (because I obviously needed to follow the naming pattern, ha ha) because I don't feel like they'd fit quite right tacked on after the epilogue here. Not sure if that's the ideal situation, but I thought about it and that's what I decided to do.
> 
> Anyway, thanks again for sticking it out with me, and for those of you who want to see all the parentheses pieces together, here they are:
> 
> _Because You Told Me to Go...I left._
> 
> _I only left because I expected you to still be here when I came back…but you weren't._
> 
> _I came up with impossible plans and fought impossible odds to get you back…because you told me once that if something is important to me, I shouldn't lose it._
> 
> _And now, after all these months, we're together again, you and I…but there's still some part of me that's terrified that I'll wake up one day and you'll be gone._
> 
> _You're important to me and I don't want to lose you again…so let me hold you for a moment, let me reassure myself that you're really still here._
> 
> _Give me a sign that you're here for good and things are going to be okay…Because I Need You to Stay._

**Author's Note:**

> FAQ:
> 
> What characters will be important? - The whole thing is pretty Natsu-centric, and Gray will be important once he comes back. But honestly, almost everyone seems to make an appearance at one point or another. Lyon will have some important parts once he shows up, and the rest of Team Natsu will also be around. I try to keep Juvia out of this as much as possible (while still being realistic) since I don't like writing her, but she shows up occasionally. Sting and Rogue will also show up for a bit towards the beginning because of the part they played in the prequel.
> 
> How does this story fit in with canon? - I tried to interfere with canon events as little as possible. Basically, I inserted a long period of time in between Fairy Tail's re-formation and Alvarez. Avatar obviously wouldn't have happened since Gray was "dead", but other than that, canon has basically been stretched rather than changed. It's assumed that Mest doesn't show up to tell FT what happened to Makarov, so they just aren't going to find Makarov for a long time because I didn't want to deal with canon events. So Erza would still be the de facto guild master while Makarov is missing.
> 
>  
> 
> Are you going to do this stupid parentheses thing throughout the whole story? - No. It's included here as a nod to the third part of the prequel, and I decided that it worked well to show denial.
> 
> A flower? Really? - Yeah...Sorry, ha ha. It's only really semi-important for the beginning and serves as a crutch to help Natsu figure some stuff out, and it also sets something up for way down the line. EDIT: Alright, so a reviewer left a really good explanation of how the flower is supposed to work: "I wouldn't say that picking a flower is a natsu-like thing, but the whole situation with him and the flower (as silly as it might be to an outsider) was really realistic , a way for someone to cope with death, what i am trying to say is whatever natsu would have picked from the graveyard would have made him act the same way toward that object ( be it a flower or not) because it would've reminded him of gray"
> 
> Well, hopefully you have some idea of what to expect now :)


End file.
